Companion & communication
Client FAQ assistant
"Which documents do you need from me?" – for the third time today, on the phone, in the middle of filing season. The answer hasn't changed in years. It's just that someone has to give it every time.
You'll get …
- 1
Answers in your firm's tone
The assistant knows your fact sheets, deadlines and processes, and answers recurring client questions the way you would.
- 2
A next step, not "please call us"
Clients go straight from their question to the right next step; requests reach the right contact in a structured form.
- 3
A handover, not advice in the chat
As soon as a question needs a tax assessment, the assistant hands over to your team – with the request already summarised.
01Intro
The client FAQ assistant takes this round of repeat questions off your firm's hands: it answers the recurring questions about documents, deadlines, payment methods and processes – on the website, around the clock, in your firm's tone. It knows your fact sheets, the steps in your portal and your rules. As soon as a question needs a tax assessment, it hands over to the member of staff responsible – with context, instead of "please call us".
Worth knowing: the assistant doesn't give tax advice – no assessments, no answers on individual cases. These limits are built into both its technical set-up and its behaviour rules. And it needs a well-kept knowledge base drawn from your fact sheets and processes – we build that together; it's the heart of the project.
02How it works
- 01
Collect the questions clients ask most
What comes in by phone and email? Front-desk experience, email threads and fact sheets give us the list of questions the assistant has to handle – and the list of those it must never answer.
- 02
Build the knowledge base – without client data
Document checklists, deadline rules, portal guides, payment methods: we structure what the firm knows. Client data is deliberately left out – the assistant knows your processes, not your files.
- 03
Set the tone and limits
How formal is the assistant, and when does it use first names? Above all: where does it stop? The rules for handing over to the team are settled before it says a word – a tax assessment always goes to a person.
- 04
Build it into your firm's website
The assistant becomes part of your website – in your firm's design, not as a third-party widget. Wherever clients have questions: on the services pages, in the client area, on the contact page.
- 05
Review and refine
The conversations show what clients ask – which leads to better answers, new fact sheets and sometimes a pointer to information that's missing from the website. The assistant becomes more useful every month.
03Stages
The starting point is deliberately limited – in a firm, an assistant above all has to be reliable within its limits.
Starter: the standard questions
Curated knowledge on documents, deadlines and processes, tight guardrails, and a clean handover to email and phone. Reliable rather than all-knowing.
Next step: assistant with request handover
A larger knowledge base with a process for keeping it up to date; client requests reach the right contact as a structured message – not a chat transcript.
Full build: the assistant that takes action
The assistant goes through the documents with the client: it checks what's still missing for the tax return, sends the checklist by email, provides the upload link and books the appointment. It also recommends the right page or fact sheet. Professional questions stay with the firm.
04Try it yourself
The assistant of the fictional “Reiter Tax Firm”. Pick a question – on the right you see where each answer comes from and when it hands over to the team.
A simulation with fixed answers from the knowledge base on the right. With a real language model you can try it with Neo, the companion of this website – 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.
05Technical implementation
- At its core is a language model with your firm's curated knowledge base as context – fact sheets, processes, deadline rules; at typical volumes it's cached rather than run through a vector database.
- The assistant runs as a component of your website with its own small back end – no third-party branding, no external widget window.
- The advice limit is enforced twice: as a behaviour rule in the prompt and as a topic filter in the back end – questions needing a tax assessment always trigger a handover to a person.
- Client data is not part of the knowledge base; what the assistant stores is decided in advance with data protection in mind – contact details are kept separately and only with consent.
- Handovers to suit your process: an email to the member of staff responsible, a callback request or a link to the client portal.
- Running costs stay manageable: an answer typically costs a few cents – we measure that rather than guess.
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.