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FOBIE.ai

Reply to customer messages when I'm not there

Messages arrive on your website, your social accounts and your email at all hours, and most of them ask one of about eight questions. This job is about answering the eight, all night, and putting the ninth in front of a human.

What a good result looks like

Use this to judge a demo. A tool that cannot do these is not doing the job, whatever it is called.

  • It answers from your actual information — your prices, your hours, your policies — not from a general guess.
  • It says it does not know rather than making something up.
  • There is an obvious, quick way for a person to take over mid-conversation.
  • It is clear to the customer that they are talking to software.
  • You get a readable record of every conversation.

What usually goes wrong

The things people find out after they have paid.

  • A confidently wrong answer about a price or a refund policy is worse than no answer, and you are the one who has to honour it.
  • Pricing is often per conversation or per resolution. Work out what a busy month actually costs.
  • If it cannot escalate, an angry customer will just get angrier.

5 tools that do this

How this list is ordered — and why money is not one of the reasons
  1. 1. How squarely the tool does this job. A tool built for this job comes before one that can be made to do it. A tool that needs wiring up comes last.
  2. 2. How much we actually know about it. A tool we have used ourselves comes before one we have only researched, which comes before one only a reader has written in about, which comes before one nobody has assessed. A tool low on this list is not bad. It is unknown.
  3. 3. How technical you need to be. Where the first two signals tie, the one a non-technical person can set up alone comes first. This site is for people who are not going to write code.
  4. 4. How recently we checked the listing. A listing we checked last month is worth more to you than one we checked last year, so it breaks the remaining ties. Listings we have never checked come last.

Nothing commercial appears on that list, and nothing commercial is given to the code that orders it. How we make money, and how you can check.

  1. Tidio

    by Tidio

    The small-business version of this job: quick to install, answers the obvious questions, hands over the rest.

    Built for thisListed, not reviewedNo setup help neededFree tier to try it

  2. Intercom

    by Intercom

    Answers from your own documented answers, and the handover to a human is well built.

    Built for thisListed, not reviewedSome setting up

  3. OpenPhone

    by OpenPhone

    Texts and calls in one shared inbox, with auto-replies, so out-of-hours messages get acknowledged.

    Does this wellListed, not reviewedNo setup help needed

  4. Birdeye

    by Birdeye

    Also handles inbound messages from the same places, which suits businesses whose enquiries arrive there.

    Does this wellListed, not reviewedSome setting up

  5. Podium

    by Podium

    Texting is the main channel, which fits trades and local services better than website chat.

    Does this wellListed, not reviewedSome setting up

Reviews against this job

Listed, not reviewedIt is in the directory. Nobody here has assessed it yet.

Nobody here has assessed any of these tools against this job yet. The listings above describe what each one is sold to do and how squarely it fits — which is real information — but none of it is a verdict, and this page does not pretend otherwise.

Used one of these for this job? Tell us what happened — reader reports are published as reader reports, in your words, clearly labelled.

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