Your chatbot is live. Here's what to check in the first week.
Installing a chatbot takes minutes. Knowing whether it's actually working takes a little more attention — and most of the problems worth catching only show up once real visitors start using it. Here's what to look at in the first week, roughly in the order it matters.
1. Read the actual conversations
Don't just glance at a "conversations today" number — open a handful of the real transcripts. This is the fastest way to see how visitors actually phrase questions, which is almost never the way you'd expect. Reading five real conversations tells you more than a week of watching a dashboard from a distance.
2. Look for "I don't know" answers, and why
A well-built chatbot says so when it can't answer instead of guessing. In week one, that's useful information, not a failure: every "I don't know" is a question your website doesn't answer yet — a missing FAQ, an out-of-date price, a service you added but never wrote up. Fixing the content behind two or three of these often does more for lead capture than any setting inside the bot itself.
3. Check that leads are actually landing somewhere
A chatbot that captures a name and contact detail is only useful if that lead reaches a person who can follow up. Confirm the notification is arriving where you expect — email, a shared inbox, whatever you've set up — and that nothing is going to a spam folder or an inbox nobody checks. This is a two-minute check that's easy to skip and expensive to skip for a month.
4. Watch for the same question with no good answer, twice
One visitor asking something your site doesn't cover is normal. The same gap showing up in a second conversation is a pattern worth fixing before a third visitor hits it. This is the week-one version of the content maintenance habit that keeps a chatbot accurate long after launch.
5. Test it yourself, from a phone, as a stranger would
Not a quick glance at your desktop — open the site on your phone, the way an actual visitor finds you, and ask it the three questions you'd expect a customer to ask most. It's a two-minute check that catches a hidden widget, a broken mobile layout, or a stale answer before a real visitor does.
The bottom line
None of this takes long — the whole list is well under an hour spread across a week. What it catches is the gap between "the chatbot is installed" and "the chatbot is actually working for visitors," which is exactly the gap that determines whether it pays for itself. For the mistakes that cause these gaps in the first place, see 5 chatbot mistakes that are costing you leads; for the math on whether it's paying off, see the ROI breakdown.