Most bots answer with rigid menus: "Press 1 for sales, 2 for support." Customers hate it, because they arrived with a specific question and got a maze instead. Mersal's bot works differently: it understands the question and answers from your content.
Two layers: fixed replies and an AI bot
Mersal gives you both, and the right approach uses them together:
- Auto-replies: keyword replies, a welcome message for first contact, an away reply outside business hours, and a fallback when nothing matches.
- The AI bot: handles the open-ended questions you could never anticipate with keywords.
The logical split: keywords catch the known, repeated questions (pricing, hours, address); AI catches everything else.
Why not let AI handle everything? Because a fixed reply is faster, cheaper and literally guaranteed. A product price or a bank account number has to come out exactly right, and that means a fixed reply rather than a model that paraphrases.
The knowledge base: where answers come from
The bot doesn't invent answers — it responds from a knowledge base you build, and it accepts three formats:
- Plain text: type the information in directly (return policy, opening hours, pricing).
- A Word file: upload a .docx containing a catalogue or product guide.
- A URL: give the bot a link to a page on your site and it pulls the content.
This is the essential difference: the bot is grounded in your real business content, so answers stay accurate and current.
How to write a good knowledge base
Answer quality equals knowledge base quality, exactly. What works:
- Write it as questions and answers: "How long is shipping? Within Cairo 2–3 working days, other governorates 3–5." That matches how customers ask far better than narrative prose.
- One fact per sentence: long paragraphs holding five facts make the bot conflate them.
- State numbers explicitly: "250 EGP", not "reasonably priced".
- Cover the different phrasings: a customer may say "how much", "what's the price", or "what does it cost".
- Write down what the bot must not answer: "If the question is a complaint or a late order, hand off to support."
Personas
You can define multiple personas per knowledge base — a sales persona with an enthusiastic tone, a technical support persona that is calm and direct. Useful when different departments use different numbers.
A persona isn't only tone, it's also boundaries. A sales persona can offer a published discount; a support persona should not quote prices at all.
AI nodes inside automation
The bot doesn't have to live in a separate conversation. The automation builder includes two important nodes:
- ai_generate: produces custom text (for example a follow-up built from the customer's name and last order).
- ai_send: replies to the customer directly inside the automation flow.
Handing off to a human
The most important setting in any bot is when it stops talking. Trigger a handoff when:
- The customer explicitly asks for a person.
- The bot fails to find an answer twice in a row.
- The message contains complaint, refund or payment-problem language.
- The conversation has run 5 or 6 messages without resolving.
A bot that hands off quickly beats one that tries to answer everything — customers forgive "let me pass you to a colleague", but they don't forgive a wrong answer.
Practical advice
- Start with a small, precise knowledge base. Lots of contradictory information is worse than a little correct information.
- Define the bot's limits: have it say "let me pass you to a colleague" rather than guess on sensitive topics like special pricing or complaints.
- Review conversations during the first week from the chats screen and adjust the knowledge base based on what customers actually ask.
- Keep the base current: stale prices in the knowledge base mean a bot quoting customers the wrong number.
- Test it yourself from another number before opening it to customers.
Frequently asked questions
Does the bot answer in Arabic? Yes, it replies in the customer's language and understands both Egyptian colloquial and Modern Standard Arabic.
What if it doesn't know the answer? It uses the fallback reply you wrote — and the better setup is to hand off to a person rather than guess.
Can I limit it to certain hours? Yes, run it only outside business hours, or always, whichever suits you.
