Custom Chatbot Development
Custom chatbot development for support, sales and internal use. Built on your own content, with honest answers, escalation to a human, and no invented facts.
Most chatbot projects fail for the same two reasons
They are built on nothing, so they guess. And they have no exit, so a customer who needs a person ends up trapped in a loop and angrier than when they started.
Both are solvable, and neither is solved by picking a better model. The work is in the content underneath, the boundaries around it, and the handover when it runs out. That is where we spend the time.
What we build
Customer support. Trained on your help material, order data and past tickets. Answers the repetitive questions, escalates the rest with context. The realistic goal is a meaningful share of first-line volume, not all of it.
Sales qualification. Answers product questions, works out whether an enquiry fits what you do, and books the ones that do. Useful mainly because it works at nine on a Sunday evening.
Internal knowledge. The one that quietly saves the most time. New staff asking how a process works, and getting the current answer instead of a document from two years ago.
How it goes
We start by looking at what you have. Not a discovery workshop, an actual audit: which documentation is current, which contradicts itself, what your support inbox is really full of. A week of that tells us whether a chatbot is the right answer, and roughly a third of the time we conclude that a better help page or one fixed process would do more.
If it is the right answer, we build a narrow version first, on the highest-volume topics only, and put it in front of real users. Narrow and correct beats broad and unreliable, and it earns the trust that lets you widen it later.
The costs nobody mentions upfront
Language model usage is a running cost, and it scales with conversations. We will size it for your volume before you commit rather than after your first bill.
It also needs maintenance. Your prices change, your policies change, and a chatbot answering from last quarter's material is worse than no chatbot. We will either train your team to keep it current or do it on a retainer, and we will tell you which we think makes sense for you.
How it works
- Grounded in your content, not the open internet
- The chatbot answers from your documentation, product data, policies and past support tickets, and it cites what it used. That is the difference between a tool your team trusts and a novelty that invents a refund policy on a Tuesday. Getting your content into a usable state is part of the work and it is usually where the real effort goes.
- It says when it does not know
- The single most damaging thing a support bot does is answer confidently and wrongly. We build in the boundary explicitly: outside the material it has, it says so and hands over. That behaviour is tested with deliberately awkward questions before launch, including the ones your customers actually ask when they are annoyed.
- Escalation that works
- A conversation the bot cannot finish reaches a person with the transcript attached, in whatever your team already uses. Nobody is asked to repeat themselves. A bot with no exit is a customer service problem wearing a technology costume.
- Where it lives is your decision
- On the website, inside WhatsApp, in Slack or Teams for internal use, or behind your own login. We have built all of these. The channel changes the interface and the constraints far more than it changes the underlying work.
- Measured against something
- Before launch we agree what it is for: deflect a share of repetitive tickets, qualify enquiries out of hours, answer product questions before checkout. Then we measure that and show you the conversations it failed at, because those are the useful ones. A bot with no target is impossible to judge and impossible to improve.
Where we have done this
What is and is not included
Included
- An audit of your existing content and support history first
- A narrow first version on your highest-volume topics, in production
- Escalation to a person, with the conversation history attached
- Adversarial testing before launch, including hostile questions
- A measurement target agreed in writing beforehand
- Monthly review of failed conversations for the first quarter
Not included
- Writing the documentation it answers from, unless quoted separately
- Language model usage, which is billed to your own account
- Human support staffing for escalated conversations
- Voice or phone channels, which are a different build
What we build it with
- Python
- TypeScript
- Next.js
- OpenAI
- Anthropic
- PostgreSQL
- pgvector
Questions
The things people ask first.
What does a custom chatbot cost to build?
And what does it cost to run?
How do you stop it inventing answers?
Can it hand over to a human?
Where can it live?
How will we know whether it worked?
Also in AI & automation
Tell us what you are trying to ship.
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