Website Chatbot Qualification

A chat widget's real job is routing: getting a visitor with a genuine question or intent to the right next step faster than a static contact form would. It fails when it either pretends unconvincingly to be a human, or reduces to a form with extra clicks that adds friction rather than removing it.

Be honest about what it is

Weak     a bot with a human name and headshot, responding as if
         it's a real person, until the illusion breaks on the
         first slightly unusual question
Strong   clearly labeled as an automated assistant, with an easy,
         obvious path to a real person for anything it can't handle

Visitors tolerate a bot that's honestly a bot far better than one pretending to be human and failing at it — the failure of a fake-human bot reads as deceptive in a way a clearly-labeled automated assistant's limitations don't. Set the expectation correctly from the first message.

Design the qualifying flow around genuine visitor intent, not a fixed script