How to answer customer questions after hours

People look up a small business when they’re deciding, and that’s usually in the evening. Somebody on the sofa at ten at night wants to know if you’re open on Sunday, if you deliver to their street, or if the dog can come too. You’re closed, your phone is on silent, and the question has nowhere to go.

Most of the time they don’t wait until the morning. They look at the next place instead.

What happens to a question at ten at night

A question asked outside your hours usually ends up in one of three places:

Your messages, where it sits under everything else until you get to it.
A contact form, which is good for a request but slow for a yes-or-no question. The visitor fills it in and waits.
Nowhere. They had the question, didn’t see an easy way to ask it, and left.

Most after-hours questions have a short answer that’s already written down somewhere: your opening times, your delivery area, what’s on this week. Somebody could answer them in a sentence, if somebody were there.

A chat that answers while you’re closed

A Keepp page can have a chat. The button floats at the bottom right of your page and stays there as visitors scroll. A visitor taps it, gives their email, and asks.

With the AI answering, the reply comes in seconds, at any hour. The AI answers from two places and nothing else: everything on your page, such as your menu, prices, booking options and links, which it picks up by itself each time you publish; and anything you add under What the AI should know in Chat settings. When a question goes beyond both, it tells the visitor it doesn’t know and marks the chat for you, so a guess never goes out under your name.

You can see how it feels on Noa’s page, a surf coach’s page with a working chat.

The questions that need you

Some questions need a person: a group of twenty, a special request, a complaint. With AI, then hand over to me, the AI answers what it can and passes those to you. The chat opens as a topic in your Telegram group, with the visitor’s email and everything said so far.

You don’t have to answer it at ten at night. Reply in the morning, from your phone, in that topic. Your reply shows up in the chat on your page, and if the visitor has closed the tab by then, it reaches them by email with a link back into the conversation.

So an after-hours question gets an answer straight away when the page has one, and a proper reply from you the next day when it doesn’t.

What to tell the AI

The AI is only as useful as what it knows. It already knows your page, so What the AI should know is for everything customers ask that isn’t written on it. Good things to include after hours:

Hours in detail: holiday closures, the kitchen closing earlier than the bar, the one day a week you open late.
Getting there: parking, the nearest stop, which entrance to use.
Policies: dogs, children, deposits, cancellations, what happens if it rains.
Delivery and collection: where you deliver, which days, and the cut-off for next-day.

Write it the way you’d answer on the phone. Short, plain sentences work best. Then read your conversations for a week. Anything flagged Needs you that has a simple answer belongs in that box.

An example

A small restaurant closes the kitchen at ten. At eleven, somebody reading the menu asks if walk-ins are OK. The AI answers from the page: walk-ins at the bar, Wednesday to Sunday from six. They ask if anything on this week’s menu is vegan, which the page doesn’t say, so the AI passes it on. The owner sees it in Telegram the next morning, replies that two of the dishes can be made vegan, and the visitor gets that by email before lunch.

Nobody stayed up, and the answer still arrived.

Setting it up

Chat is part of the Influencer plan. Switch it on in Chat → Settings, choose who answers, fill in What the AI should know, and add the chat block to your page. To have chats handed to you, connect a Telegram group from the same settings.

Set up chat walks through each step, and How live chat works on a Keepp page follows one chat from start to finish.