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Take the website chatbot down if customers say they can't reach a person
Justin White, owner of K&D Landscaping, Inc. in Watsonville, California, in The Edge, the National Association of Landscape Professionals' magazine
When K&D's website chatbot started getting negative feedback about how hard it was for customers to reach a human at the company, it moved away from the feature. White says the sales process is best started and finished with personal interaction; automated emails in the middle of the process to keep a client informed are fine.
The chatbot isn't named; no cost applies to the lesson
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The problem
The company had a chatbot on its website, and customers started complaining.
What happened
The chatbot came down after customer complaints; no numbers are given. White's warning: "If you're too transactional to automated, they don't have anyone to refer, they just have a product or a result." Self-reported.
Quoted in the source: Justin White, owner, K&D Landscaping. Source: The Edge (National Association of Landscape Professionals): Smarter, Faster: Exploring AI and Automation in The Industry (2024-07-26) · Added 2026-10-19.
How to set it up yourself
- What K&D Landscaping did: it took its website chatbot down after customers complained it was hard to reach a person.
- If you run a chatbot or AI responder, put a "talk to a person" option and your phone number in its first reply.
- Read a month of its conversations yourself (or use the prompt below) and count how many people asked for a human or gave up.
- Keep the first conversation and the close with a person, and automate only the updates in between, where White says automated emails are fine.
Copy-paste prompt
Here are {NUMBER} recent conversations from the website chatbot of {COMPANY NAME}, a landscaping company (names removed): {CONVERSATIONS}. 1) How many visitors asked for a person, repeated themselves or left without an answer? 2) Which questions did the bot handle well? 3) Should we keep it, limit it to those questions, or take it down? Base every answer only on these conversations.The $39 Plumbing & HVAC AI Starter Kit has ready-to-use call scripts, missed-call texts, estimate follow-ups and review templates, built from 18 real, sourced setups. Instant download, 30-day refund.
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