This week we added this AI chatbot to our store:

https://elfsight.com/ai-chatbot-widget/

So far the results seem promising.

We trained it using a few uploaded *.txt files covering shipping, use cases, and pressure washer compatibility. After some tweaks, the chatbot now gives accurate, useful responses. Here’s an example:



The chatbot also does a good job of recognizing when not to answer and suggests the visitor contact us:




Elfsight charges based on page views. If your site gets around 10,000 visitors per month, their Pro plan at $12/month might be sufficient.

We previously tested a competing product, Big Sur AI, but were unable to get reliable responses.

We’d like to hear your experiences or suggestions if you've tried something similar.

Hi Paul, thanks for posting this. I've been poking around on their website and there is some good stuff at reasonable pricing there.
I'll give the chatbot a try in the coming days and post my thoughts.

Thanks,
David

I could get it to handle support and head to the beach for the summer!

Thanks for sharing this, Paul.

Vince

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Dave, the chatbot can be configured to send an email transcript after each completed chat, so we’ve been able to review the conversations. So far, the replies seem solid.

We're now getting about as many daily chats as we do pre-sales support emails. Elfsight confirms their backend uses ChatGPT, which in my experience is one of the more reliable AI tools.

This forum may not be the best place to get into configuration details for another company’s product, but feel free to message me — I’m happy to share suggestions.

One Elfsight widget that puzzles me is the Logo Showcase:

https://elfsight.com/logo-showcase-widget/

At first glance, it seems like a powerful marketing tool.

But using a customer logo without written permission could lead to a lawsuit. Beyond privacy issues, it falsely implies endorsement.

Our "Fortune 500" customers are just their employees cleaning the drains—no one with the authority to approve our use of the logo knows we exist.

I purchased this and implemented it almost 30 days ago and I can actually say it has done very well for us.

It took a little to setup and train but so far most of the questions have been answered extremely well.

A few not so much, but that is where we add those new questions and provide the correct answers.

What helped was I copied all of the product details in .txt format from each product page and input those as well as all our FAQ pages.

I think I'll be keeping it. The price is very reasonable too. I had a technical question where is asked it in the forum and I received a reply from a real person in a fairly short period of time.

My phone hasn't rang as much either with customers asking all those simple questions. That's why you have a FAQ page right? If you can just get people to read them. LOL

I think having both the FAQ page and using AI chatbot provides customers multiple ways to get help.

Thank you pauld for sharing this. (Side note: I purchased one of your 100' long drain cleaner hoses a few years back. I worked wonders on our plugged storm drains)

Patrick

Hi Patrick, is the FAQ your own, or part of the chat feature?

Thanks
David

OH - I bought from Paul too.

The FAQ is on my website that I created, and added to over the years.

I just copied it all and converted to a .txt file and then uploaded it to the chatbot.

Thanks...

David

After monitoring Elfsight’s Chatbot on our site for about a month, we’ve found it surprisingly effective—and it adds a sense of legitimacy, since a lot of larger sites now offer chat.

That said, it takes some tuning to get consistent results, especially for vague or poorly worded opening questions. At first, the chatbot would misclassify some of these as off-topic—questions like “can I start upstream?” that sound nonsensical but might be relevant with some context. We had to revise both the Instructions text and Training documents to guide the chatbot through edge cases like these.

The chatbot Instructions field has a major influence on behavior. Sometimes, no amount of tweaking our training docs helped until the Instructions included general guidance for unusual or ambiguous cases.

Elfsight seems to be based outside the EU, so we'll avoid using their chatbot’s form feature to collect any personally identifiable information (PII).

Here’s a thread on the Elfsight Community board about training the chatbot, including our mixed results using FAQ pages as training documents: https://community.elfsight.com/t/ai-chatbot-training-best-practices-thread/129880/16