If you’ve ever interacted with a chatbot before the advent of AI platforms like ChatGPT, you know how frustrating it can be trying to find the answer to your question.
“With these chatbots a lot of it was just built on branching logic,” says Chad Diller, president of Landscape Leadership, a sales and marketing agency for lawn and landscape companies. “It was like if someone says this thing, give them these choices. There wasn’t this big knowledge base.”
Now, there is the far more robust option of an AI website agent powered by ChatGPT.
Addressing Concerns
Adam Zellner, vice president of sales for Oasis Turf & Tree, based in Loveland, Ohio, says when they first started using their AI website agent, he was concerned there were going to be issues with the information the AI website agent provided. He says it was nerve-wracking wondering what kind of recommendations it would give and if it would use the proper tone.
However, he quickly found it was able to respond properly, even to tricky questions like ‘Who’s the best lawn care company?’ by saying it couldn’t answer that question but provided reasons why people love Oasis.
In the case of a person asking questions related to self-harm, it will say, ‘Unfortunately I’m here to answer your questions about lawn care, trees and pest control.’ Zellner says if they have a medical emergency and they’re asking questions, the AI website agent will direct them toward emergency services.
Zellner says they also addressed their team’s concerns about the implementation of AI meaning they would be replacing jobs.
“I’ve made a point of every Monday, I send out all of the conversations and all of the answers from the previous week and just share those with our teams,” Zellner says. “They have those and they can see, ‘Man, this is really awesome that it’s doing that.’”
Rather than replacing an office position, Diller says an AI website agent helps enhance your customer service team.
“Its job should be guiding the user to the next step of research on the website or getting a quick answer to a question like how high do you mow your lawn so that you’re not answering very simple things,” Diller says. “Always try to get people to the point where they’re going to fill out a form or give you a call.”
Mistakes to Avoid
Diller cautions that an AI website agent not trained properly might give bad answers.
“If you don’t monitor the conversations going on and it keeps giving bad answers, that’s a drawback,” Diller says. “I don’t really see a lot of downsides other than if you just don’t execute it properly or you don’t monitor it.”
Zellner agrees taking the time to revise responses that are a little off is critical.
One person on your team should be responsible for monitoring these conversations. Diller says typically this individual is the one who was passionate about adding the AI website agent in the first place. He suggests reviewing conversations every day for the first month. As time goes on, the same questions are asked, so revising a response will take care of it for future instances.
Diller adds you should make it clear that the AI website agent is a robot on your company site. Oasis’s avatar for their AI website agent is a robotic toucan.
Implementing Your Own AI Website Agent
Diller says that adding an AI website agent can help enhance the user experience on your website as visitors seek answers. He says as AI becomes more integrated into everyone’s lives, it’s changing people’s behaviors and how they interact with things when they’re searching for information.
“People don’t want to call, they want to chat,” Diller says. “So they put it in this agent, and then it gives them the answer. They’re happy as can be, and then you don’t have the disruption or the additional phone call. I’m interested to see how this takes off. I believe that you’re going see more and more of these things on websites.”
Diller estimates landscape companies implementing an AI website agent will need to invest 10 to 20 hours to set it up right. He encourages developing a list of your FAQs and answers with your team. Cover aspects like your service areas, services offered, and messaging guidelines. He adds that on an ongoing basis, review the past week’s conversations and revise these responses as necessary.
Diller advises having some baseline pricing available for the AI website agent to reference, as the second most commonly asked question is how much a certain service costs.
“Your goal is always to casually encourage the person to have a conversation with people on your team,” Diller says. “Have them fill out this form. We’ll call you right back, and we’ll give you give you an exact quote for your lawn and answer any questions you have.”
Diller says there is a learning curve if you try to implement it yourself.
“If you don’t want to do any of this, you can talk to marketing agencies about if they have experience building an AI website agent,” Diller says. “The other part of that is it worth paying a marketing professional and website development professionals to help figure out how to set this up in the best way. That might be a small project of a couple $1,000 to do something like that. It might be something that if you’re getting a website built, it might be one of these things that you want to add to that proposal to do that.”
Zellner encourages other companies to add their own AI website agents.
“I know it sounds very technical,” Zellner says. “It sounds like a lot of work, but as long as you provide the documents and are in it every day in the beginning to teach and coach it on what you’re looking for and what tone you want it to speak in, it learns really quick. It’s just it’s one of the coolest tools that we’ve implemented with probably the least amount of effort.”
