:: AI services / AI chatbot development
An AI chatbot development company for bots that know your business
We build custom chatbots that answer from your own help centre, product data and policies, in your tone of voice, and pass the conversation to a person when they should. No scripted decision trees and no made-up answers.
Answers from your own content
Website, app, WhatsApp, Slack
Clean hand-off to your team
:: What we do
Custom chatbot development
We pick the channel and the knowledge sources first, then build the bot around them.
01
Customer support chatbots
Answer order, billing and product questions around the clock and open a ticket with the full conversation when a person is needed.
02
Website and lead chatbots
Answer pre-sales questions, qualify visitors and book meetings straight into your calendar or Salesforce.
03
Internal knowledge chatbots
Let staff ask HR, IT and policy questions in Slack or Teams and get answers with links to the source document.
04
WhatsApp and messaging bots
Order updates, appointment booking and reminders on the channels your customers already use.
05
In-app assistants
A chat panel inside your web or mobile app that knows the user’s account and can guide them through tasks.
06
Multilingual chatbots
One bot that answers in your customers’ languages, with answers checked against the same source content.
:: Use cases
What businesses use AI chatbots for
A good chatbot does one job well before it does five. These are the jobs we build chatbots for most often, each grounded in the business’s own content and systems.
Support
Customer support and order questions
Answers about orders, returns and delivery from your store and help centre, and passes harder cases to a person with the full conversation.
Read the blueprint
Sales
Lead qualification and booking
Asks the questions your sales team would ask, books viewings or calls straight into the calendar, and logs the lead in your CRM.
Read the blueprint
Internal
Staff knowledge assistant
Answers HR, IT and policy questions from your own documents in Slack or Teams, with links to the source.
Read the blueprint
Bookings
Appointments and reservations
Checks availability, books, reschedules and sends reminders, for clinics, salons, service businesses and restaurants.
Onboarding
Product help inside your app
Guides new users through setup and answers how-to questions from your documentation, right where they are stuck.
Messaging
WhatsApp and social channels
The same assistant on WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger, so customers get answers on the app they already use.
:: Step by step
How to build an AI chatbot that customers trust
Most chatbots fail because they guess, not because the model is weak. This is the order we build in, so the bot answers from facts and knows when to stop.
01
Decide the job and the limits
Write down the questions the bot should answer, the actions it may take, and the topics it must hand over. A narrow, clear job beats a bot that tries to do everything.
02
Collect and clean your content
Gather help articles, policies, product data and past support replies. Remove outdated pages and fix contradictions, because the bot will repeat whatever it is given.
03
Ground answers in your content
Use retrieval so the bot looks up the right passage before it answers, and cites it. If nothing relevant is found, it says so instead of making something up.
04
Connect the systems it needs
Order lookups, bookings, CRM records or ticketing. Each connection gets the narrowest access the task needs, with confirmation before anything changes.
05
Design the handover to people
Decide when the bot passes to a person, how the conversation arrives in your helpdesk, and what customers see outside working hours.
06
Test with real questions
Run a few hundred real customer questions through it, score the answers, and fix the content or instructions behind every wrong one before launch.
07
Launch, watch and improve
Start on one page or channel, review conversations every week, add missing answers and expand once the numbers hold up.
:: How it works
How we build a chatbot
The model is the easy part. The quality comes from the content and the testing.
01
Gather the knowledge
Help articles, FAQs, policies, product data. We clean and structure them so the bot can find the right answer.
02
Design the conversation
Tone, greetings, when to ask follow-up questions and exactly when to hand over to a person.
03
Test with real questions
Hundreds of past customer questions, scored for accuracy before the bot goes live.
04
Launch and tune
Weekly review of unanswered questions and low ratings, and content updates to close the gaps.
:: Cost and timeline
How much does chatbot development cost?
Typical prices for our chatbot projects, based on a senior team at $25 to $35 an hour. You get a fixed quote after a short discovery call.
Starter chatbot
$5k – $12k
3 to 6 weeks
One channel, answers from your website and help content, handover to email or your helpdesk, and a simple dashboard.
Multi-channel assistant
$12k – $30k
6 to 10 weeks
Website plus WhatsApp or other channels, CRM or helpdesk integration, lead capture, multiple languages and analytics.
Advanced or transactional
$30k – $70k
2 to 4 months
Takes actions such as bookings, order changes or account updates, connects to several systems, with testing and approval steps.
What it costs to run
For most business websites, model and hosting costs run from tens to a few hundred dollars a month, depending on traffic and conversation length. Channels like WhatsApp add their own per-message fees. We size this with you before build.
What moves the price
Number of channels and languages
How many systems it reads from or writes to
Whether it takes actions or only answers
Volume and quality of your existing content
Handover and helpdesk requirements
:: Quality checklist
What separates a useful chatbot from an annoying one
Customers forgive a bot that says “let me get a person”. They don’t forgive one that confidently gets it wrong. This is what we build in, and what we avoid.
Built into every chatbot
Answers only from your approved content
Shows sources or links for its answers
Clear handover to a person, with context
Knows your opening hours and escalation rules
Conversation logs and weekly quality review
Privacy notice and data retention settings
Mistakes we help you avoid
Bots that invent prices, policies or dates
Endless loops with no way to reach a person
Launching on every channel at once
Outdated content nobody owns
No measure of what customers actually ask
:: Why Sterling
What makes our chatbots different
Answers come from your content, with sources
The bot says when it doesn’t know
Hand-off to people with the full conversation
Analytics on what customers ask and where the bot fails
Works with Salesforce Service Cloud, Zendesk, Intercom and HubSpot
:: Tools we use
OpenAI
Claude
Gemini
Retrieval-augmented generation
pgvector
Pinecone
Twilio
WhatsApp Business API
Slack
Microsoft Teams
Salesforce Service Cloud
4.9
Average rating on Clutch · 350+ projects since 2019
:: Questions
Questions about AI chatbots
How much does chatbot development cost?
How long does it take to build an AI chatbot?
Will the chatbot make things up?
Can the chatbot hand over to a human agent?
Do we need an AI chatbot or an AI agent?
How do you build an AI chatbot for a website?
How much does it cost to run an AI chatbot each month?
Which channels can the chatbot work on?
Can the chatbot answer in multiple languages?
Is a ChatGPT-based chatbot safe for customer data?
How do we keep the chatbot's answers up to date?
:: Related AI services
Other ways we can help
Send us your brief. We’ll help turn it into reality
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