02 /STACKS / ai-customer-support
AI Customer Support for Small Business
A support bot for a small business that answers from your docs and escalates to humans.
observed by @whysanesanders · verified 2026-08-15
$45/mo
difficulty: intermediate
The components
The recipe
- Collect the corpus. Export help-center articles, past ticket answers and your FAQ into markdown. Garbage in, garbage deflected.
- Chunk and embed into Qdrant. The managed free tier covers a small business corpus; use Claude or OpenAI embeddings via API. ~500-token chunks with title metadata.
- Wire n8n (cloud Starter, ~$24/mo). One workflow: incoming email/chat webhook → embed question → Qdrant search → Claude answer with sources → send or escalate.
- Answer with Claude via the Anthropic API. Haiku-class model for cost ($0.80/1M input); prompt caching on your system prompt and docs index. Expect ~$20/mo at a few thousand conversations.
- Set the escalation rule. No confident answer below a similarity threshold → create a human ticket with the draft reply attached. Never let the bot guess on refunds.
- Add a feedback button. Thumbs-down answers land in a review queue; every miss becomes a new doc or a chunk fix.
- Review weekly. Read 20 random conversations. Deflection rate and wrong-answer rate are the only two numbers that matter.
When this breaks down
Past ~50k conversations/mo, per-conversation API cost and n8n execution pricing both bite — that’s when a dedicated support platform or self-hosted n8n starts paying for itself.