Free Basic Support Automation Template: Route Inquiries

The Basic Support Automation template is a short, deliberately simple chatbot that lets your customers submit an inquiry to your support team without ever touching a contact form. It greets the visitor, asks what the inquiry is about, invites them to describe the problem in their own words, collects a name and an email address, and confirms that someone will be in touch within 24 to 48 hours. Then it offers to take another inquiry. That is the whole bot, and the shortness is the point.

Most support pages still hand a frustrated customer a static form with six fields, a captcha and a submit button that produces no acknowledgement beyond a grey banner. The customer has no idea whether the message arrived, who will read it, or when. This template replaces that form with a conversation. Each question arrives one at a time, the bot reacts to the answers, and the closing message sets an explicit expectation about the reply window. The mechanics are not complicated - a handful of nodes wired in a line - but the experience is markedly less cold than a form, and the data you receive on the other end is cleaner because the bot validates the email address before it accepts it.

It is the right template when you want structured intake and nothing more. There is no knowledge base, no self-service answers, no branching diagnostic tree and no ticket status lookup. Every conversation ends the same way: a categorized inquiry with a description and a verified contact address, waiting for a human. If you want the bot to also answer the easy questions before it collects a message, the technical support triage template goes further into classification and routing, and the after-hours answering template covers the same intake job outside office hours. For pure "let people reach us properly", this one is enough.

The template is built entirely in Conferbot's no-code chatbot builder, so changing the categories, rewriting the greeting or adding a question is drag-and-edit work rather than a development ticket. It runs on your website widget and on every other channel Conferbot supports, and it is small enough to publish on the same day you open it. This page walks the real conversation node by node, explains which Conferbot node types build it, and covers setup, customization and channel fit.

The template ships with playful sample copy that you are meant to rewrite in your own brand voice. Here is the flow exactly as it arrives, in the order a visitor experiences it.

1. The greeting

A welcome node opens with "Hewwo there!" - a deliberately informal placeholder that signals this is demo copy. Immediately after it, a choice node sets the context: "Welcome to our help center" with a single button, "I have a question". A one-button opener looks redundant at first glance, but it does real work: it converts a passive visitor into an active participant with a single tap, and it means the bot never starts interrogating someone who opened the widget by accident. Nothing is collected until the visitor has chosen to engage.

2. Choosing a category

The bot then asks "What is it regarding?" and offers four options: Request a refund, Cancel contract, Report an issue and Other. The answer is stored in a variable called regarding. This single question is the most valuable field in the whole conversation. It tells you which queue the message belongs in before anyone has read a word of it, and over time it tells you where your problems actually cluster - if "Cancel contract" quietly becomes your largest bucket, that is a product signal, not a support signal. The "Other" option exists so nobody is trapped by a category list that does not describe their situation.

3. Describing the problem

Next comes the free-text question: "I'm all ears, tell us more...", saved to a variable called tell_more. This is where the customer tells their story in their own words, and it is intentionally open. Dropdowns cannot capture "the second replacement arrived with the same fault and nobody has answered my last two emails", and that sentence is what lets an agent resolve the case in one touch instead of three. Asking for the category first and the description second also has a subtle benefit: by the time the customer is typing, they have already framed their own problem, so the descriptions tend to be more focused than what the same person would write into an empty email.

4. Name, then email

Only after the inquiry is fully captured does the bot ask for contact details. First: "Thank you! May I have your name?", which stores the answer as name and replies "Nice meeting you, {name}" using the answer straight back in the acknowledgement. Then: "What's your email by the way?". The email node validates the input and, if it does not look like an address, responds "Please enter a valid email address" and asks again. That validation loop is quietly one of the most useful parts of the template - an inquiry with a mistyped email is an inquiry you can never answer, and static forms let those through constantly.

The ordering here is deliberate and worth preserving if you customize the flow. People abandon a conversation that demands their identity before it has shown any interest in their problem. Asking for the description first means that by the time the bot wants an email address, the customer has already invested effort and wants the reply.

5. Confirmation and the loop

A message node closes the intake: "Thanks, we will get in touch in 24-48 hours." A concrete window is far better than "as soon as possible" - it converts anxious waiting into patient waiting, and it is the single line most worth editing to match the response time you can genuinely hold to. The bot then asks "Anything else we can help you with?" with two buttons. "Nope" ends the conversation with "Have a nice day! Talk soon." "Actually... yes!" loops the visitor straight back to the category question, so a second inquiry is captured as its own categorized record without repeating the greeting or re-asking for a name and email.

That loop is the only branch in the entire flow. Everything else is a straight line from greeting to confirmation, which is why this template is realistic to launch in an afternoon.

Understanding the pieces makes the template easy to extend, because every node in Conferbot's builder behaves the same way wherever you place it: it asks something, optionally stores the answer in a variable, and passes control to whatever is wired after it.

Nine nodes in total. Because every answer lands in a named variable, the completed conversation is a structured record rather than a transcript: category, description, name, email. That structure is what makes the inquiry easy to forward, file or push into another system, and it is why a conversational intake is more useful downstream than a free-form email even though it feels lighter to the customer.

Two node types are conspicuously absent, and knowing that tells you what this template will not do. There is no human-handover node, so the bot never transfers a live conversation to an agent - it takes the message and promises a reply later. Live chat and the unified inbox are available on every Conferbot plan including Free, so if you want an "talk to someone now" escape hatch, adding a live chat handover node after the category question is the highest-value change you can make. There is also no calendar node, so nothing is booked; if your support flow ends in a call, that node can be dropped in before the confirmation message.

The Basic Support Automation template fits any business whose support volume is real but whose inquiry types are few, and whose current answer to "how do I reach you?" is a form or a support email address.

Subscription and SaaS businesses. The four shipped categories - refund, cancellation, issue report, other - map almost exactly onto the inbound mix of a small subscription product. The refund and cancellation categories in particular are worth capturing separately, because those are the conversations where a fast, human reply changes the outcome. A cancellation request that sits unread for three days is a cancellation; the same request answered in two hours is often a conversation.

E-commerce stores with a small team. Stores usually do not need a diagnostic bot. They need order problems, returns and refunds to arrive with an order reference and a working email address. Add one question asking for an order number after the category step and this template does the entire job. Paired with a WhatsApp or Instagram deployment, it also catches the customers who would never have opened a support page at all.

Service businesses and agencies. Clinics, studios, local services and consultancies typically get a mix of new-business and existing-client messages. Renaming the categories so the first option separates prospects from current clients turns the same flow into a router: sales inquiries to one inbox, support to another, each one already labelled.

Teams replacing a contact form. If your current support entry point is a static form, this template is a direct upgrade with almost no risk. It collects the same fields, validates the email, sets an expectation the form never set, and lets the visitor file a second inquiry without reloading anything.

Anyone starting on the free plan. The template is small enough to live comfortably inside Conferbot's Free plan, which includes 600 conversations a month, one chatbot and two team members - along with live chat and the unified inbox. For most small teams that is a genuine support setup rather than a trial, and the paid plans exist for when volume grows rather than because a feature is missing.

It is the wrong template in two situations. If most of your inbound volume is repeat questions that have documented answers, you want an FAQ bot in front of the intake - browse the support and FAQ template library for one that matches your subject matter. And if your inquiries need diagnosis before they can be routed, a triage flow with branching questions will serve you better than a single free-text box.

This is one of the fastest templates in the library to put into production. The work is almost entirely copywriting.

Step 1: Open the template and fork it into your workspace

Find Basic Support Automation in the Support and FAQ template library and fork it. You get your own editable copy with all nine nodes and the edges already wired, including the loop back from "Actually... yes!" to the category question. Nothing in the original changes when you edit your copy.

Step 2: Rewrite the demo copy

The sample text is intentionally casual so that you notice it. Replace "Hewwo there!" and "Welcome to our help center" with your own greeting and your company name. Then work through every other message: the category prompt, "I'm all ears, tell us more...", the two contact questions, and the sign-off. Read the whole flow out loud once - support copy that sounds wrong when spoken sounds wrong when read too.

Step 3: Fix the categories and the reply window

These are the two edits that matter most. Rewrite the four category options so they match how your team is actually organized - the value of the category is that it routes, so a category nobody routes on is wasted. Keep an "Other" option regardless of how confident you are in the list. Then change "we will get in touch in 24-48 hours" to a window you can genuinely hold. Promising two hours and delivering in two days does more damage than promising two days.

Step 4: Decide where the inquiries go

Every completed conversation lands in Conferbot's unified inbox, which is where a small team can work directly. Beyond that, the template's captured variables can feed your existing tools through the integrations hub: Gmail for email notification, Google Sheets for a running log, HubSpot or Zoho CRM if inquiries should attach to contact records, Slack or Discord to alert a channel the moment a refund request arrives, and Airtable or Notion if your team already tracks work there. Webhooks and the API are available from the Starter plan upward for anything custom, and Zapier connects the rest.

Step 5: Pick a channel and publish

Install the website widget on your help, pricing and account pages - not just the contact page, since the moment someone wants support is rarely the moment they are looking at your contact page. Then publish to the messaging channels your customers already use. Channels are not plan-gated on Conferbot, so this is a configuration decision rather than an upgrade decision.

Step 6: Walk it yourself before you announce it

Run the flow end to end on a phone. Submit a real inquiry in each category and confirm it arrives where you expect it, with the category and description intact. Deliberately type an invalid email to see the retry prompt fire. Take the "Actually... yes!" branch and check that a second inquiry is recorded separately. Then check that your team can actually answer within the window the bot just promised, because that promise is now a commitment.

The template is a skeleton, and it is designed to be extended. A few changes repay the effort immediately.

Add the one identifier your team always needs. For most businesses there is a single field that turns a guess into an investigation: an order number, an account reference, a booking ID or a subscription email. Add an ask-custom-question node right after the category step for it, and make it clear the customer can skip it if they do not have one. This is usually the highest-return single edit to the template.

Branch the categories. Because the category question already knows what the inquiry is about, you can give each option its own follow-up. A refund request can ask for the order reference and reason; an issue report can ask which product and what the customer was doing when it happened; "Other" can go straight to free text. Conferbot's n-select-option node routes each option to a different next node, so this is wiring, not code. If you find yourself building four deep branches, you have outgrown a plain intake bot - start from a branching template such as technical support triage instead.

Add a live handover for the urgent cases. A human-handover node placed on the highest-stakes category gives angry or urgent customers a way to reach a person immediately rather than waiting out the reply window. Conferbot's live chat and unified inbox are on every plan, including Free, so this costs nothing to try.

Ask for a phone number when the case needs a call. An ask-phone-number node after the email question, offered only on the categories where a call is likely, saves a round trip. Or add a calendar node and let the customer book the call directly - see calendar booking.

Close the loop with a satisfaction question. A rating-choice node before the sign-off asks how the intake felt. On Pro and above, those responses roll up into the CSAT dashboard; on any plan they show up in chatbot analytics alongside completion rates for each step, which is how you find out that a question you thought was harmless is where people abandon.

Localize rather than translate literally. If you serve several markets, the category names usually need rethinking rather than word-for-word translation, since the way customers describe a cancellation or a refund differs by market. For a flow designed around multiple languages from the start, see multilingual customer support.

Which channels suit it

Structured intake travels well, because every step is a short question or a small set of buttons - nothing depends on a wide screen or rich formatting. The website widget is the obvious home, and it is where the "replace the contact form" argument is strongest. WhatsApp suits it particularly well for e-commerce and service businesses, because the customer's phone number is already known and the reply lands somewhere they will actually see it a day later - which matters when the bot has promised a 24 to 48 hour response. Instagram and Messenger catch the customers who complain in a DM instead of opening a support page, and Telegram works the same way in markets where it dominates.

Internally, Slack and Microsoft Teams turn the same flow into an IT or HR intake desk without changing a node - only the categories and the greeting need rewriting. All ten channels are available on every plan, and running the same bot across several of them through omnichannel deployment means inquiries from every source land in one inbox rather than in five different places. In 2026, that consolidation is usually worth more to a small support team than any individual feature.