A 24/7 support assistant, with a handoff.

Most of the questions a small store gets are the same handful, asked over and over: where's my order, do you ship to my area, how do returns work, is this back in stock. They arrive at 11pm and on Sunday morning, long after you've closed the laptop. A support assistant trained on your own policies can answer those routine ones around the clock, then hand anything tricky cleanly to a person. Done well, customers get help faster and you get your evenings back. Done badly, it's the rage-inducing bot everyone's met. This lesson is how to build the first kind.

Train it on your own FAQs and policies

The difference between a useful assistant and a useless one is what it's been fed. A generic chatbot guessing from the open web will get your shipping times and returns window wrong, which is worse than no bot at all. A good one is grounded in your own material: your FAQs, your shipping and returns policy, your product information, your hours. That way the answers are actually right for your store. Modern support tools, Gorgias is one common example, let you point an assistant at your existing pages and documents, so it answers from your real policies rather than improvising. If it isn't built on your own content, don't ship it.

The non-negotiable: a clean handoff

This is the rule that separates a helpful assistant from an infuriating one. The assistant handles the routine questions it's confident about, and the moment something is outside that, a complaint, a refund dispute, anything unusual or emotional, it hands off cleanly to a human. No dead ends, no "I'm sorry, I didn't understand that" loop, no trapping someone in a script. A good handoff says, plainly, "let me get a person onto this," and passes the conversation, with its context, to your inbox or your support tool. Customers forgive a bot that knows its limits. They never forgive one that won't let them reach a person.

Scope it to what it's actually good at

Be honest about the job. The assistant's sweet spot is the high-volume, repetitive, low-stakes questions:

• "Where's my order?" with tracking, the biggest single category for most stores.
• "What's your returns policy?" and how to start one.
• "Do you ship to [place]?" and how long it takes.
• "Is this in stock / what size / what's it made of?" straight from your product info.

Keep it well away from anything that needs judgement: pricing exceptions, complaints, account or payment problems, anything legal or financial. Those go to a person, every time. A narrow assistant that nails the routine 60 to 70 percent is far more valuable than a broad one that fumbles the hard cases and upsets people.

Be upfront, and keep a person on it

Tell people they're talking to an assistant. A simple "Hi, I'm the [store] assistant, I can help with orders, shipping and returns, or put you through to the team" sets honest expectations and builds trust. Behind the scenes, keep a human in the loop: read the transcripts now and then, watch for questions it's getting wrong or handing off too often, and feed the answers back into its source material so it improves. The assistant deflects the easy load; you stay in charge of the experience and the edge cases. On WooCommerce you've got plenty of room to wire an assistant into your store and your support inbox the way you want, rather than being boxed in by a hosted platform's add-on.