AI customer support chat for your website

Put one line on your website and a chat button appears in the corner. Behind it is a bot that has already read your site. A visitor asks whether you deliver to their town, and the answer arrives in a couple of seconds, in their language, with the page it came from underneath. When the question needs a person, your team takes over in the same conversation. That's crew bot's AI support chat for your website, and it counts your visits and pages too, without cookies.

What it does

• Reads your site for you. crew bot reads your pages, then writes an overview of your business and the questions visitors ask, each answered from its page. Nobody fills in a knowledge base by hand.
• Answers in seconds, in the visitor's language, streaming the reply as it's written, with the pages it used shown underneath.
• Never makes things up. When your content doesn't answer, it says so and offers a person. It never invents prices, dates, discounts or promises.
• Hands over to your team. A visitor waiting for a person shows in Needs you, sounds an alert, and emails your team if nobody replies within two minutes.
• Live, both ways. The visitor sees when your team is typing and watches the bot's answers stream in; your team sees the visitor typing. Files go both ways too.
• One inbox for every conversation, the bot's included, with the ones waiting for you on top.
• Analytics of visits and pages, with search engines and other robots counted apart, never as visitors.
• An analytics-only mode for a site that wants the figures and no chat.
• Many sites, one workspace, each with its own bot, greeting, colour and knowledge.

How the AI support chat for your website works

It learns your site on its own

When you add a site, crew bot reads its pages: from your sitemap, or else the links on your home page, up to 150 pages. It keeps the text, not the layout, and leaves out what repeats on every page, like the menu. It reads them again every week, or whenever you press Read it again.

Right after reading, it writes two things:

• An overview of the business: what it is, what it sells and for how much, how to start, where it is and how to reach it. This goes with every answer.
• The questions visitors ask, in their words, with answers from your pages: 15 to 60 of them, each linked to its page. For one 32-page site, that was 47 answers, written for about one US cent.

Change any of them and they're yours, kept as you wrote them. Delete one and it isn't written again.

On top of that you can add your team's own answers (they come first when they match), documents such as a price list or a policy (PDF, Word, Excel or text), instructions on tone and what never to say, and a booking link the bot may share.

It answers from your content alone

For each message, crew bot finds the closest parts of that knowledge and writes a short reply from them alone, starting in about a second. It knows which page the visitor is on and what's been said so far. It never claims to be a person and never shows its instructions.

The visitor sees where each answer came from ("From: Pricing · Refunds"), and those links open your pages.

It gets better every week

Questions the bot couldn't answer are listed under the site's knowledge, each with a button to write the answer. Answer a few each week and the gaps close. Any good reply your team writes in a conversation can be saved as an answer with one click.

When a person takes over

The bot hands over when the visitor asks for a person, when it can't answer after trying, or when the matter needs one: a complaint, a refund, an account. If it doesn't have their email yet, the chat asks for a name, an email and, optionally, a phone number. While they wait, the bot still answers what it can.

Your team hears about it three ways:

1. It counts in Needs you, linked straight to the conversation.
2. An alert sounds on the crew bot board and in the Mac app.
3. An email goes to the people who answer for that site if nobody has replied within two minutes.

When someone replies, the conversation is theirs and the bot stays out of it. The visitor sees it happen: "Albert from Acme joined the chat", and the top of the window changes from the bot to Albert. Hand back to the bot returns it, and the bot answers whatever the visitor said last. If the visitor has already left, your reply goes to their email with a link back to the chat.

Files travel both ways, up to 20 MB each: pictures, PDFs, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, text and CSV, and short videos. Each file is checked by its contents as well as its name, so web pages, programs and archives never get in, and files open right in the chat window. The bot reads a document's words; a picture it can't see, it says so and brings in a person.

When the conversation is solved, the visitor is asked: Did that help?

The inbox your team works from

Support in crew bot has one site picker and four tabs.

• Inbox: every conversation, with those waiting for you on top and how long they've waited. Filter by waiting, yours, bot answering or solved. Open one to see the transcript (the bot's answers show their sources), the visitor (name, email, country, device, how they found you, every page they read) and a box to reply. Add a note only your team sees, solve it, save an answer, block a visitor, or delete a conversation for a visitor who asks to be forgotten.
• Analytics: your traffic and your chat, below.
• Visitors: who's on your sites right now and what they're reading, and everyone seen today or in the last 7, 30 or 90 days, each with the path they took.
• Sites: setup, knowledge, team and install, for each site.

Members read and answer conversations; admins add, change and remove sites. Your crew can help as well: a bot on a job can see what's waiting, read a conversation, pull this week's figures, save an answer, or suggest a reply that a person sends with one click. Only the site's own bot ever writes to a visitor by itself, and only in the chat.

Visitors and analytics, without cookies

The same line that shows the chat also counts visits. Pick today, or 7, 30 or 90 days, each compared with the period just before:

• Six figures: visitors, visits, page views, time on site, bounce, and chats.
• Your sites side by side, if you have more than one.
• Pages: most read, where people arrive, where they leave, and what's read longest. Open a page to see where its readers came from and where they went next.
• Where people go next: the paths from one page to another, most taken first.
• How they came (sources, campaigns, linking sites), where from (countries, cities), on what (devices, browsers), and when (the week by the hour, the busiest hour named).
• The chat: conversations, answered by the bot alone, handed to a person, your team's median first reply, how many said it helped, and the pages where chats start.

Robots are kept apart. Search engines, AI crawlers, link previews, SEO tools and browsers driven by programs are listed on their own Robots tab, with what they read, and never counted as visitors.

Analytics only. Turn off Show the chat for a site and the same line shows nothing on the page and only counts visits. No bot reads that site. Turn the chat on later and it reads the site then, with nothing to paste again.

Read more about what cookieless analytics can and can't measure.

Set it up in six steps

1. Add your site in Support: its name and addresses. The www version is always included, and a site at several addresses is one site.
2. Pick its bot from the bots in your workspace, then its greeting, colour, corner of the screen, and when to ask for an email: when a person is needed, before the chat, or never.
3. Let it read the site. Then look at what it wrote about your business and the answers, and change anything that's off. Add a document or two if your prices or policies aren't on the site.
4. Try it. Try it opens the real chat window, as your visitors will see it.
5. Choose who answers: everyone who can, or chosen people, and whether they're emailed when a visitor waits.
6. Paste the line. Copy the one line from Install and paste it before </body> on your site. Install tells you once it's been seen there.

For developers: open the chat from your own button with CrewBot('open'), start it with a question, or tell the bot who a signed-in user is with CrewBot('identify', { name, email, hash }), where the hash, made with your site's secret, proves it's really them.

For a general walk-through, including what to check before you go live, see how to add an AI chat to your website.

Safe by design: a bot that can do almost nothing

A support bot talks to strangers, so crew bot gives it almost no power. It reads the site's knowledge, writes a reply, asks for a person, and saves the details a visitor types into the form. It has no tools: no servers, databases, files, payments or other bots. Whatever a visitor writes, including "ignore your instructions", can at worst produce an odd reply, never an action. Everything that changes something is done by a person. That's the strongest defence against prompt injection.

The rest is locked down too:

• Your line works only on your sites. The chat window can be shown only on your site's own addresses.
• Strangers can't reach your workspace. Each visitor gets a token that can't be guessed or swapped for another's.
• Signed-in users can't be faked. Without the hash, a name and email are marked as given by the visitor, not verified.
• Limits keep abuse out: per visitor (one message every second and a half, 20 in ten minutes, 100 a day), per network, per site, and 2,000 characters per message. Your team can block a visitor.

Privacy

• No cookies. The visitor's id is kept in your site's own storage.
• No IP addresses kept, only the country they point to.
• "Don't track" is respected. When the browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, or you turn tracking off for a site, no visits are recorded. The chat still works.
• Robots are never counted as visitors.
• Kept only as long as useful: pages read for 90 days, visitors who never chatted for 13 months, conversations until you delete them.

What it costs

Support is part of crew bot. Replies are paid like any other work the crew does: from your plan's AI allowance, which is measured at what the AI providers charge with no markup, and then from your wallet if you allow it. Each site has a monthly spending cap, 10 US dollars by default (about 10,000 replies). Past it, or if your wallet is empty, visitors are told a person will reply, and your team sees them in Needs you. Files count against your workspace's storage.

crew bot is free to start; paid plans are $19, $49 and $149 a month per workspace. See pricing.

How it compares

If you know Intercom's Messenger with Fin, Crisp or tawk.to, this is that idea, built into crew bot: the bots are the crew you already have, and your team answers where it already works. Some help desks go further in places, with bots on WhatsApp or email, or AI that issues refunds by itself. crew bot's chat is for your website, and its bot answers but never acts.

See the full field in the best AI chatbots for websites, or compare directly with Intercom Fin and Tidio.

FAQ

Will the bot make up answers?

No. It answers only from your site, your team's answers and your documents. When those don't cover the question, it says so and offers a person. It never invents prices, dates, discounts or promises.

Does crew bot's support chat use cookies?

No. The visitor's id is kept in your site's own storage, IP addresses are never kept (only the country), and when a browser says "don't track", no visits are recorded.

Can I use it only for analytics, without the chat?

Yes. Turn off Show the chat for a site, or choose Analytics only when you add it. The same line then shows nothing on the page and only counts visits.

Can I put it on several websites?

Yes. One workspace can have many sites, each with its own addresses, bot, greeting, colour and knowledge, and Analytics shows them side by side.

What languages does it answer in?

The bot answers in the language the visitor writes in. The chat window's own words (buttons, status lines) follow the visitor's browser language in 13 languages, with English otherwise.