Service terms

This page explains our terms in plain English. The contract itself is the Services Agreement you sign with us, together with its Order Form and the Data Processing Agreement. If anything on this page differs from the signed documents, the signed documents are what apply.

It runs month to month

The agreement starts on the date written on it and carries on, rolling, until one of us ends it. There is no minimum term and no fixed term.

You choose on the Order Form whether to pay monthly or annually in advance. That choice affects only how you pay. It does not change how long the agreement lasts or how either of us can end it.

Ending it

You can end the agreement at any time by giving us 30 days’ written notice. An email to the address we have given you for notices counts as written notice. You pay for the service up to the day it ends. Service charges you have already paid in advance are not refunded when you are the one choosing to end it.

We can end the agreement in the same way, with 30 days’ written notice to you. If we do, and you have paid in advance, we refund every complete unused month.

Either of us can end the agreement at once for any of these reasons:

• an undisputed amount is due and is still unpaid 14 days after a written reminder;
• the other seriously breaks the agreement and does not put it right within 14 days of being asked in writing;
• the other keeps breaking it in a way that reasonably shows it cannot or will not keep to it; or
• the other stops or threatens to stop paying its debts, cannot pay them when due, admits it cannot, is treated in law as unable to, or goes into administration or insolvency.

If the agreement ends for one of those reasons, we refund every complete unused month you have paid for in advance.

A data processing agreement is part of the contract

Your customers’ names, contact details and conversations are personal data, and you are responsible for them as the controller. We handle that data on your behalf as your processor, and only on your instructions, unless the law requires otherwise, in which case we tell you first where the law lets us.

That relationship is set out in a Data Processing Agreement, entered into with the Services Agreement. In practice you sign both in the same signing pack, and we do not start work on your assistant until you have, so it is in place before the assistant goes anywhere near your website.

When the services end, we return your personal data to you or delete it from our live system, whichever you choose, promptly, unless we have to keep some of it for legal or compliance reasons or under our own retention policy. The enquiry emails we have already sent you are your own records and are not covered by our deletion timetable. Copies in our encrypted backups expire within 30 days and are only ever restored in a disaster.

The assistant is one line of code on your website

We supply the embed code and the chat window. In practice the embed code is one line, which you or whoever looks after your site pastes into it. You put it only on your own website, at the address on your Order Form, and nowhere else.

When the agreement ends, your licence to use the service ends at once and we remove the service within a reasonable time. In practice, removing that one line from your website removes the assistant from your pages.

The rest, in brief

What we provide. We build the assistant’s knowledge base from your content, host and run the assistant, supply the embed code and the chat window, email you every enquiry, send you a periodic summary of usage and performance, give reasonable support by email, maintain the service during business hours at no extra charge, pass on the improvements we make to the engine, and provide 12 months of audit-trail data from your use of the assistant. We do all of this with reasonable skill and care, to good industry practice and the law.

Paying. You pay monthly in advance by Direct Debit or card, unless your Order Form says otherwise or we agree otherwise in writing. Prices are shown without VAT, which is added at the current rate. We may raise the price once a year, with at least 30 days’ written notice. If a payment is missed, we tell you and allow 14 days; if it is still unpaid after that, we may pause the service until it is paid. You still owe the charges while it is paused, and we may charge interest on an amount not paid when due. If you think an invoice is wrong, tell us in writing within 30 days of its date, saying what you dispute and why; we both make reasonable efforts to settle it within 30 days, and no interest runs on an amount you have genuinely disputed that way.

More than one business. If you run more than one business, you can add an assistant for the website of another business you own, at the additional-site rate shown on your Order Form. That rate depends on the tier of your main subscription and applies only while that main subscription is live.

If you end your main subscription, one of your remaining sites moves to the full rate for its tier from the first billing date after your main subscription ends. You choose which one. We give you 14 days’ written notice of the change, and if you have not told us by then it will be your oldest remaining site.

Your side. You keep your knowledge folder up to date. You put in it only your own business information that you are happy for the assistant to give to enquirers, never staff records, customer data or anything private, because the assistant may use anything in the folder to answer. You check material before you give it to us and do your best to keep it true, accurate, current and complete, and you are responsible for checking any analysis or output the AI produces. You tell us promptly about anything time-sensitive, such as price changes, closures or new opening hours. You check the summary we send. You have your own website privacy policy, using or adapting the wording we give you, and you meet your own duties as controller, including having a lawful basis and getting any consents or approvals you need. You do not use the service for anything unlawful or to collect payment-card details, and you set it up and use it so that it does not handle special-category data, criminal offence data, health or medical information, financial account details, legal case information or other sensitive information.

Accuracy. The assistant is set up to answer only from your approved content. When it cannot answer, it takes the visitor’s details and passes the enquiry to you. It is presented to visitors as automated. It is not set up to give medical, legal, financial or other professional advice, and it is not an emergency channel, so you must not present it as one. Like all AI systems it may occasionally answer incorrectly or incompletely despite the safeguards, and it is a first line of contact, not a replacement for your people on important or sensitive matters.

We do not use your data to train AI. We do not use your content, your data or your customers’ conversations to develop, train or fine-tune any AI system or model. We may use anonymised, aggregated statistics about the service that identify neither you nor any visitor.

What is yours and what is ours. Your branding, your business information and all data about your website’s visitors, enquiries and customers stay yours. The engine, the assistant and the tools we use to run them stay ours. While the agreement runs, you let us use your branding and materials to provide the service, and we give you a licence to use the service for your own business, which you cannot pass on to anyone else.

Availability. We do not guarantee any particular level of uptime. The service depends on third-party providers for hosting, AI, database and email, whose availability is outside our reasonable control. If the assistant is unavailable for more than five days in a row in any month, through no fault of yours, you can end the agreement immediately, provided you tell us in writing within 30 days of the end of that month, and we refund the charges paid for that month.

Changes. We may improve or change how the service works, but we will not make a planned change that materially reduces what it does, how it performs or how secure it is, unless the law or a serious security problem requires it.

Liability. The contract limits what each of us can claim from the other. Apart from the exceptions below, neither of us is liable to the other for indirect, special or consequential loss, or for loss of revenue, profit, goodwill or reputation. We are not liable for loss that comes from out-of-date or inaccurate material you gave us, from use of the service outside the agreement, from reliance on an answer the assistant gave, or from something you did or failed to do. Each side’s total liability to the other is capped at the amount you paid or owed us in the 12 months before the claim. None of this limits liability that the law does not allow to be limited.

Confidentiality. Each of us keeps the other’s confidential information confidential, during the agreement and for three years after it ends. The exceptions are the staff, officers, representatives, contractors, subcontractors or advisers on either side who need it to carry out the agreement and are under much the same duty of confidence, and disclosure that the law, a court or a regulator requires. You do not put our confidential information through any AI or machine-learning tool.

Law. The agreement is governed by the law of England and Wales, and any dispute goes to the courts of London.