Updated August 2026 · 6 min read
The model behind your chatbot gets all the attention, but it's the least interesting part. Two chatbots on identical AI engines can be night and day, and the difference is training. A bot fed your real facts answers like an employee who knows the business. A bot fed nothing answers like a stranger guessing. This is how you train one properly, in about fifteen minutes.
A modern chatbot doesn't answer from general knowledge when it's set up right. It answers from a knowledge base — the content you give it — and that's the whole ballgame. Feed it your opening hours, your prices, your policies, and it answers those exactly. Feed it nothing and it has to improvise, which is where chatbots earn their bad reputation.
ChatNest's bot is retrieval-based: it searches your knowledge base for the answer before it speaks. Trained properly, it won't tell a customer your shop closes at 9pm when it closes at 5. It can't, because 9pm isn't in the content.
Start with the boring, essential stuff. Opening hours (including weekends and holidays), address, phone, services, prices, delivery options, returns policy. Write it as plain, natural sentences — "We deliver within 3 working days across the UK mainland" beats a table of abbreviations. The bot matches customer questions to this text, so real sentences work best.
Open your support email, your messages, your DMs. Find the twenty or thirty questions people actually ask, and write the answers you actually give. That last bit matters: if you've been answering "do you ship to Northern Ireland" by email for years, that's the question and the answer your bot needs, worded the way you'd word it.
Inventing FAQs from what you think customers might ask is how bots end up answering questions nobody asks while missing the obvious ones. Use the real ones. ChatNest's FAQ template gets you started with common categories you can edit to match.
If you have a website with product pages, delivery info or FAQs already on it, enter the URL in ChatNest and it crawls up to 25 pages on the free plan (more on paid plans) automatically. The content becomes part of the knowledge base, so the bot answers from pages you've already written. You can combine all three sources — pasted facts, FAQ pairs, crawled pages — in one bot.
Every chatbot needs a few rules: how it introduces itself, how it handles questions outside your content, what it should never promise. ChatNest's behaviour rules let you say "don't invent prices" or "always offer the help desk link for complaints" in plain language. The rules apply to every answer, which is how you keep the bot on-brand without writing a hundred variations.
Before it goes live, ask it the way a customer would. "How much is delivery?" "Do you open Sundays?" "Where's my order?" The live preview in your dashboard shows you exactly what visitors will get. If an answer is wrong, the fix is usually the content — tighten the wording and try again. A minute of testing now saves a hundred awkward conversations later.
Keep legal, medical or financial advice out of the bot's mouth. If a customer asks about liability or a prescription, the right answer is "that's outside what I can help with" plus a handoff to your team, not a confident guess. The inbox takeover means your people pick up exactly those conversations, in the same thread.
Opening hours, address, prices, services and policies — the facts customers ask about most, written as plain sentences.
Twenty to thirty real questions from your actual inbox is a solid start. Real questions beat invented ones.
Yes. Enter your URL and ChatNest crawls up to 25 pages on the free plan (more on paid plans), combining them with anything you paste in.
No. It answers only from your content and hands off anything else to your team from the inbox.
Whenever something changes — prices, hours, policies. The bot reads the current content, so stale content means wrong answers.
Free plan, 15 minutes, no credit card. Your customers meet a bot that sounds like you.
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