Look at your chat transcripts and one message will show up more than any other. Some version of "how much does this cost". It arrives first, it arrives often, and how your chatbot handles that single exchange decides more leads than the rest of the script put together.
Most businesses handle it badly, and they do it in one of two directions.
The two ways to lose the conversation
The first is deflection. "Pricing depends on your needs, can I get your email and someone will follow up?" That is heard, correctly, as a refusal. The visitor asked a direct question and hit a wall, and now they have to pay in contact details just to get past it. A good share of them will close the tab and ask a competitor who answers.
The second is over-answering. Reciting a full rate card to somebody whose situation you know nothing about invites them to price-shop a number that may not even apply to them. It also ends the conversation at the exact moment it was about to become useful, because once they have a number there is nothing left to talk about.
Both failures come from the same mistake: treating price as a single fact to be released or withheld, rather than as the opening of a conversation.
Give a range, then earn the right to narrow it
The version that works looks like this:
"Most jobs like this land between six and nine hundred. It depends mainly on access and how much has to come out. What are you looking at?"
That answer does three things at once. It treats the question as legitimate, which immediately separates you from every site that dodged. It filters out anyone for whom the range is impossible, which saves both of you a callback. And it hands back a question the visitor now actually wants to answer, because a more accurate number is in it for them.
Notice what it does not do. It does not promise a number it cannot keep, and it does not ask for an email before it has given anything.
This article is part of our guide to answering the price question without losing the lead.
"It depends" is only useful if you say what it depends on
Sometimes the honest answer really is that it varies. Fine. But "it depends" on its own is noise, and visitors read it as evasion because most of the time it is.
"It depends on square footage and whether the existing floor has to come up" is information. It tells the visitor what drives the price, it makes you sound like someone who has done this before, and it usually prompts them to volunteer both facts without being asked. You have just qualified the lead using the question they asked you.
The test is simple. If your pricing answer would leave a stranger no better informed than before they asked, it is not an answer.
What if you genuinely cannot publish a number
Some businesses have a real reason. Custom work with a hundred variables, negotiated contracts, regulated pricing. Even then there is almost always something true you can say:
- A floor. "We do not usually take projects under about two thousand" costs you nothing and saves everyone the wrong conversation.
- A unit. Per room, per user, per visit, per month. A unit price with an unknown quantity is still orientation.
- A comparison. "About the same as a mid-range replacement, less than a full rebuild." People price things relative to what they already know.
- A typical case. "A three-bedroom in this area usually runs X." Specific, honest, and clearly not a quote.
If none of those are possible, it is worth asking why, because your competitors are managing to say something. A business that cannot state any number in public is usually not protecting a secret. It is usually avoiding a decision it has not made internally.
Give the bot the real information
This is the cleanest argument for letting a chatbot draw on your actual pricing material instead of a short list of approved phrases. A range you would happily say out loud on the phone is a range the bot should be able to say at 10pm on a Sunday, which is when a lot of these questions arrive.
Two cautions come with that. Whatever the bot reads has to be current, because a bot quoting last year's prices is worse than a bot that says nothing. And it needs explicit permission to say it does not know, so that an unusual question produces "I am not sure, let me get you to somebody who is" rather than a confident invention.
What to do after the number
The price answer is the middle of the conversation, not the end. Once the visitor has a range and has told you a little about their situation, you are in the best position you will ever be in to ask for contact details, because you have already given them something.
That order matters more than the wording. Asking for a phone number before answering feels like a toll. Asking after feels like the obvious next step. Same question, completely different response rate.
And when you ask, say what happens next in a way that can be checked. "Someone will call you before 5pm today" converts better than "we will be in touch", partly because it is more reassuring and partly because it is a promise you can keep or fail to keep, which is exactly the point. If nobody is going to call before 5pm, do not say it.
When an exact number beats a range
Ranges are the right default for custom work, but plenty of businesses are not doing custom work and should stop pretending they are. If you charge a fixed fee for a cleaning, a consultation, a service call, or a monthly plan, say the fixed fee. A range on something with one price reads as hedging, and it invites the visitor to assume the top of the range applies to them.
The same goes for the call-out fee that a lot of trades businesses bury. Visitors find out about it eventually, and finding out at the door is considerably worse for you than finding out in chat. Stating it upfront costs you the people who were never going to pay it and buys trust with everyone else.
A useful way to decide: if two customers with the same request would be charged the same amount, publish the amount. If they genuinely would not, publish the range and the reason they differ. Almost every pricing answer falls cleanly into one of those two, and businesses get into trouble mainly by using range language to describe a fixed price because it feels safer.
The one thing that ruins all of it
None of this survives a slow follow-up. If a visitor gets a good pricing answer, hands over their number, and hears nothing for two days, you have not gained a lead. You have created a person with a specific reason to be annoyed with you, and they will remember the name.
Before you turn any of this on, settle three things: the lead lands somewhere a human already looks, one named person owns the response, and the stated response time is short and real. Speed matters more here than almost anything else, because the visitor is comparing you against whoever answers first.
A short checklist
- Answer the question. A range, a floor, a unit, or a comparison. Something.
- Say what moves the number. Two factors is plenty.
- Ask one thing back. The fact that would narrow the range most.
- Then ask for contact details, not before.
- Promise a specific follow-up time you can actually meet.
- Read the transcripts monthly and watch where the pricing exchange loses people.
Businesses tend to guard price because they are afraid of being compared. The uncomfortable truth is that they are being compared anyway, and the only question is whether they are in the comparison or absent from it. Answering plainly is the cheaper option.
Related reading: How Website Chatbots Capture More Leads, Chatbot Lead Qualification: Convert Visitors into Customers.
Alma handles this side of it: chatbot builders by industry.