Companion & communication
Client FAQ assistant
"Which documents do you need from me?" – for the third time today, on the phone, in the middle of deadline season. The answer has been fixed for years. It's just that a person has to give it every time.
Website companion & knowledge chat
01Client FAQ assistant
The client FAQ assistant takes exactly this loop off your firm: it answers the recurring questions about documents, deadlines, payment routes and processes – on the website, around the clock, consistent in the firm's tone. It knows your info sheets, your portal steps and your rules. And it knows its limit: the moment a question needs a tax assessment, it hands over cleanly to the responsible clerk – with context, not with "give us a call". For clients it feels like service. For your team, like quiet.
Straight up: the assistant doesn't do tax advice – no assessments, no case-by-case answers. Those limits are anchored technically and in behaviour, not just promised. And it needs a maintained knowledge base from your info sheets and processes – we build that together, that's the real core of the project.
02Demo
The assistant of the fictional “Reiter Tax Firm”. Ask one of the three client questions – and watch two things: where the answer comes from, and where the assistant deliberately hands over to the firm's team.
The living example: Neo, the companion of this website, works exactly to this pattern – only with a real language model. Ask him in the bottom right.
The companion invents nothing: it answers from a curated knowledge base built from your content. And for anything that needs judgement or expertise, there's the built-in switch to a human.
The most important part is the least conspicuous: the maintained knowledge base on the left. It decides whether the companion is useful or merely polite.
03How it works
- 01
Gather the real client questions
What actually lands on your phone and in your inbox? From reception experience, email threads and info sheets comes the list of questions the assistant must handle – and the list of ones it must never answer.
- 02
Build the knowledge base – without client data
Document checklists, deadline logic, portal guides, payment routes: the firm knowledge gets structured. Client data deliberately stays out – the assistant knows your processes, not your files.
- 03
Define tone and limits
How formal is the assistant, when does it use first names? And above all: where does it stop? The handover rules to the team are set before it says a word – a tax assessment always goes to a person.
- 04
Embed it on the firm's website
The assistant becomes part of your website – in the firm's design, not as a foreign widget. Where clients have their questions: at the services, in the client area, on the contact page.
- 05
Watch and sharpen
The conversations show what clients really ask – out of that come better answers, new info sheets and sometimes a hint about which information is missing on the website. The assistant gets more useful every month.
04Stages
The entry point is deliberately limited – above all an assistant in a firm has to be one thing: reliable within its limits.
Entry: the standard questions
Curated knowledge on documents, deadlines and processes, tight guardrails, a clean handover to email and phone. Reliable rather than all-knowing.
Extended: assistant with concern handover
A larger knowledge base with an upkeep process; client concerns reach the right contact as a structured message – not a chat transcript.
Full build: the thinking assistant
The assistant recognises the concern, recommends the right page or info sheet and prepares the contact – the model you're experiencing on this website right now.
05Technical implementation
- At its core is a language model with the curated firm knowledge base as context – info sheets, processes, deadline logic; at typical volumes cached rather than run through a vector database.
- The assistant runs as a component in your website with its own small back end; no foreign branding, no external widget window.
- The advice limit is doubly anchored: as a behaviour rule in the prompt and as a topic switch in the back end – tax-assessment questions always trigger the handover to a person.
- Client data is not part of the knowledge base; what the assistant stores is set beforehand with a data-protection eye – contact data kept separate and only with consent.
- Handovers to suit your process: an email to the responsible clerk, a callback request or a link to the client portal.
- Running costs stay manageable: a warm answer typically costs a few cents – that's measured, not guessed.
for context · This shows how something like this usually gets built – not how it has to be built for you. What actually fits is worked out in the project: around your existing setup, your team, and what stays easy to maintain.