Control how it answers
Set your bot's fallback message
One line you write yourself, shown whenever the bot cannot answer and whenever your monthly credits run out.
Before you start
- You can sign in to your dashboard and open one of your bots
- You have a phone number or an email address you are happy to give visitors
About 5 minutes. You’ll do three things:
- write the line
- paste it in and save
- test it on your own site
Your bot cannot answer everything. When it is stuck it says one line instead, and you write that line. It is called the fallback message, and it is the last thing a lot of visitors read before they leave or pick up the phone.
When visitors see it
| What happened | What the visitor sees |
|---|---|
| The bot cannot find the answer in your training material | Your fallback message, as an ordinary chat reply. |
| Your monthly credits have run out | Your fallback message again, still as an ordinary reply. No billing warning, no error, nothing that tells a customer about your account. |
| A payment failed and the account is past due | A fixed line we write: There's a billing issue with this chatbot. Please contact the site owner. Your own message is not used here. |
| The connection or the model itself fails | A short apology and a Try again button. Your message is not used here either. |
The dashboard says the same thing back to you. When the credits go, the banner reads Out of credits, and under it: Upgrade to keep chatting. Your customers see your bot’s configured fallback message in the meantime. What happens when credits run out covers that side in full.
What visitors get if you never write one
Leave the box empty and your bot still has something to say. Two lines are built in, and they are not the same line.
| Situation | The built-in line |
|---|---|
| The bot cannot answer | I couldn't find that in our knowledge base. Please contact support. |
| Credits have run out | We're currently unavailable. Please try again later. |
The first of those two is also the grey placeholder inside the empty box, which is easy to mistake for something you already typed. If the box is grey, it is empty. Neither line names your business, gives a phone number, or tells anyone what to do next — which is why it is worth five minutes to replace them.
Write one that works for both
A fallback message that earns its place does four things:
- It admits plainly that the bot does not have the answer.
- It gives one way to reach a person — a phone number or an email address, spelled out.
- It says nothing about credits, plans, errors or accounts.
- It reads the same whether the bot is stuck or the month's credits have gone.
Write it and save it
In the bot sidebar, under Bot setup, click Bot behaviour.
Click the Fallback tab.
The heading reads Fallback message, and under it: What the bot says when it can't find a confident answer in your training material.
In Message, type the line you want visitors to read.
The box is three rows tall. Two sentences is plenty.
Click Save.
Saved. Changes are live for new conversations. appears beside the button.
Tell the bot what to do next
Under the message sits a second box, Policy, headed What happens after fallback?. Visitors never read this one. It is an instruction to the bot, and the page suggests one: Offer to put the visitor in touch with a human. Fill it in when you want something to happen after the bot gets stuck. Leave it empty and your message does the work on its own.
Why the exact wording matters
Adoomi marks a reply as a miss when it matches your fallback message exactly. Those are the chats that turn up under the Unanswered filter in Chat review, and they are what the knowledge-gap counts are built on. So a short, distinctive line does two jobs: it helps the visitor, and it keeps your own record of what the bot could not answer honest.
One caveat, stated plainly. The bot is told to use your line word for word when it is unsure, and mostly it does. Only the out-of-credits reply is sent exactly as you typed it, because no model is involved in that one. Short lines survive best.
If it didn’t work
Visitors are getting the fallback message far too often
- Check
- Open Chat review and click the Unanswered filter to read the actual questions.
- Fix
- If those questions are ones your website answers, the bot has not been trained on that page yet — add the page and retrain. If they are questions you have never answered anywhere, the bot is working correctly and the fix is to write an FAQ.
- Resolved when
- The Unanswered list gets shorter, and the questions left on it are ones you genuinely do not answer.
The bot says something close to my message, but not word for word
- Check
- Read the reply next to your line. Small changes in wording mean the model paraphrased it.
- Fix
- Shorten the message. One or two plain sentences survive far better than a paragraph, and a shorter line is also matched more reliably by the Unanswered count. There is no setting that forces the exact words when the bot is stuck.
- Resolved when
- Stuck replies read as you wrote them, and Chat review starts counting them as unanswered.
Visitors saw a line about a knowledge base that I never wrote
- Check
- Open the Fallback tab. If Message is empty, they read the built-in line, I couldn't find that in our knowledge base. Please contact support.
- Fix
- Type your own line into Message and click Save. Check the text is black, not grey — grey means you are looking at the placeholder and the box is still empty.
- Resolved when
- The next stuck answer on your site reads your line instead.
Visitors saw a billing line instead of my message
- Check
- There's a billing issue with this chatbot. Please contact the site owner. is a failed payment, not an empty balance. Check your inbox for an email whose subject starts Payment failed and then names the amount.
- Fix
- Open Plan & billing and click Manage subscription to update the card. Answers resume once the payment goes through, and your own fallback message goes back to being the one visitors see.
- Resolved when
- Visitors stop seeing the billing line and your bot answers again.
I changed the message and the old one is still showing
- Check
- Look for Saved. Changes are live for new conversations. beside the Save button. If you never saw it, the change was not saved.
- Fix
- Type the line again and click Save. Then test in a fresh browser tab — a chat window you already had open keeps its old conversation. If it still shows the old line after that, email hello@adoomi.ai with the bot's name.
- Resolved when
- A new conversation on your site gets the new line.
What this can’t do
- One line covers both cases. You cannot write one message for a missing answer and a different one for empty credits.
- The bot is asked to use your words verbatim, not forced to. Only the out-of-credits reply is guaranteed to be exact.
- A failed payment shows our fixed billing line instead of yours, because the visitor needs to know to contact you.
- A connection or model failure shows a short apology and a Try again button, not your message.
- The message belongs to one bot. Each bot you run needs its own.
- Policy is an instruction to the bot, not text for visitors — nothing you type there is shown in the chat.
- Leave Message empty and nothing is ever counted as unanswered. The match is against your own line, so the Unanswered filter and the knowledge-gap counts stay empty until you write one.