When Your Website Chatbot Gets It Wrong, You Own the Answer

A tribunal has already decided who is responsible for what the bot says.

The Case That Settled It

A customer asked Air Canada's website chatbot about bereavement fares. The bot told him he could book at full price and apply for the discount retroactively within ninety days. He booked. He applied. The airline refused, because that was never the policy.

He took it to the British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal and won. The airline was ordered to pay $650.88 plus tribunal fees.

The argument the airline made is the part worth knowing. It submitted that the chatbot was a separate legal entity responsible for its own actions. The tribunal rejected that outright and held that Air Canada is responsible for all the information on its website, whether it comes from a static page or a chatbot.

That principle is now the working assumption in most consumer contexts. The bot on your site speaks for your business the way an employee at your counter does.

Why This Lands Harder on a Small Business

An airline absorbs $650 without noticing. The exposure for a small business is different in kind rather than in size.

A bot that quotes a price you cannot honor puts you in a conversation where you either lose money or lose the customer, and the customer has a screenshot.

A bot that promises availability you do not have books you into a Saturday you cannot staff.

A bot that describes a warranty you do not offer has made a representation about your work that you get to explain later.

And a bot that gives clinical, legal or safety guidance in a regulated trade creates a category of problem no refund resolves.

The pattern across all of them is the same. The bot was confident, the customer relied on it, and reliance is what the tribunal cared about.

What Bots Invent About Local Businesses

Prices come first, and it happens even when you never gave the bot a price list. Asked what something costs, a model will produce a figure that sounds reasonable for your industry.

Availability is second. Asked whether you can come out today, it will often say yes, because helpfulness is what it was trained toward.

Policy is third. Refunds, cancellations, warranties, guarantees. It will interpret, and interpretation reliably drifts toward what the customer wants to hear.

Scope is fourth. Whether you service an area, a brand, a model, a condition. It will extend your capabilities outward rather than admit a limit.

What to Bound Before It Goes Live

Decide what the bot may never say, and enforce it in configuration rather than in a prompt you hope holds.

No prices. Ranges included. Route price questions to a person or to a quote form.

No commitments about availability. It can show the calendar. It cannot promise a slot.

No policy interpretation. Refunds, warranties and guarantees go to a human, always.

No advice in a regulated area. Medical, legal, financial, structural. It books the consultation and stops.

Then give it a good failure mode. "I want to get that right for you, let me get someone who can answer properly" is a better outcome than a confident invention, and customers respond to it well.

Read the Transcripts Every Week

The conversation log is the most underused asset in a small business website.

It tells you what people ask before they buy, in their own words, which is the raw material for your service pages and your FAQ.

It tells you where the bot is drifting, before a customer relies on the drift.

It tells you which questions cause people to leave, which is usually price or availability, which is usually a sign the page should have answered it.

Fifteen minutes a week. Nobody does this and everybody should.

Where Most Owners End Up

After a cycle or two, the businesses that keep a bot narrow it to what it does reliably.

It captures the name, the number and the job. It shows real availability and books an appointment. It answers a short, fixed set of questions with answers a person wrote and approved. It hands off cleanly and fast for anything else.

That version is less impressive in a demo and it does not misrepresent your business. For a shop where one bad quote is a real percentage of a week, that trade is worth making.

A Short Pre-Launch Checklist

Ask it what your cheapest job costs and see what it says.

Ask it whether you can come out this afternoon.

Ask it for something you do not offer and see whether it says no.

Ask it a question about a town outside your service area.

Ask it about your refund policy.

Anything it invents in those five questions, it will invent to a customer this week.