A welcome message, a keyword rule, a scripted flow and an AI answerbot are four different tools that get sold as one feature. They solve different problems, they fail in different ways, and the right order to try them in is the order below — simplest first, because the simplest thing that works is also the thing that cannot surprise you.
| Auto-repliesWelcome and away messages | Always right |
|---|---|
| Keyword rulesIf the message contains X, do Y | Predictable |
| Scripted flowsA menu with branches | Bounded |
| AI answerbotFree-form questions | Off by default |
The rightmost column is really a risk column. Work down it only as far as you need to.
Two messages: a welcome, sent to somebody writing to you for the first time, and an away message, sent outside your business hours.
Start time, end time, which days, and a timezone — defaulting to 9:00am–6:00pm, Monday to Friday, Asia/Kolkata. This is separate from the campaign send window, which governs outbound; this one governs what an inbound message gets when nobody is there.
Unglamorous, and the highest-value automation most businesses will ever turn on. Somebody messaging at 9pm gets an honest answer about when they will hear back instead of silence.
A rule watches for something and does something. Each has an explicit priority, and they are evaluated in that order, so which rule wins is a decision you made rather than an accident of creation date.
A flow is a sequence of steps with options — the numbered-menu pattern, which is unfashionable and extremely reliable. Use it when the set of things a customer might want is genuinely small and known: check an order, book a call, talk to a person.
The reason to prefer a flow over an AI for these is not cost. It is that a flow cannot say something you did not write.
For the questions a menu cannot anticipate. You give it context about your business and a tone, and it answers from that.
Deliberately. Enabling it means writing the business context it answers from, which is the work that decides whether it is useful or embarrassing. A product that switches this on by default is making a decision about your customers that is not its to make.
It is not a salesperson and it does not close. Treat it as the thing that keeps a conversation warm at 11pm until somebody real is available — and read what the AI is not allowed to do for the harder limits, including the approval gate on anything that spends money.
The most important setting on the answerbot is when it stops. Two controls:
The second is the one worth turning on. The failure mode of an unsupervised sales bot is not silence; it is confidence.