This is a blog post about a bot, written partly to help train the bot — so that when someone asks it about itself, it has something to link to.

Atomic’s AI assistant started as a weekend experiment. The goal was modest: could we set up a chatbot that helps ten people per week with common technical or sales-related questions? It’s now handling far more than that, and the results have genuinely surprised us.

We wanted an AI bot that is quick to respond at all hours, with accurate and detailed information.

AI bots have a terrible reputation in the ISP industry — and honestly, it’s deserved. The big ISPs built bots that behave like automated call centre agents: they force you through scripted menus, block you from reaching a human, and leave you more frustrated than when you started.

Our approach is different. Our AI assistant is entirely optional — it’s there for customers who prefer a quick chat experience over opening a support ticket, especially outside office hours. It’s a convenient interface to knowledge – it’s not a gatekeeper.

You’ve probably seen us say “no endless chatbots” on our website. We mean it.

What made our AI assistant project possible was something we’d already invested in: comprehensive, well-written support documentation. The bot draws on those guides to give accurate, specific answers rather than generic filler. Getting it to a useful state took a weekend — not because the AI part is simple, but because the hard work of writing good documentation was already done.

As far as we can tell, most other fibre ISPs in South Africa don’t have anything like this yet. That’s probably not a technology problem — it’s a documentation problem. You can’t build a useful support bot on top of support content that doesn’t exist. Atomic currently has the best technical documentation in the local fibre ISP industry.

Things our bot can do

• It can answer support questions
• It can answer sales and network coverage questions
• It can answer onboarding questions (orders about to go live)
• It can troubleshoot fibre line issues if you upload a photo of your fibre box lights (v1.1)
• It can pause the conversation to try fix spelling issues (v1.2)
• It can troubleshoot using iPerf test results (v1.3)
• It can fetch active network status notices (v1.4)
• It can share a link to this blog post if it has to explain its own limitations

Things our bot can NOT do

• It can’t email, search the web, or make a phone call
• It can’t transfer a conversation to a human
• It does not have access to internal systems like customer billing info
• It does not have memory between chat sessions
• It will not engage in general topic chats, so you can’t ask it about the weather

Things our bot is aware of

• It will try to work out if it’s talking to an existing Atomic customer
• It knows about the departments inside Atomic and will try to establish which is the most relevant department for each query
• It knows about our fibre package options, so it can do pricing and speed comparisons
• It knows that most support or sales queries relate to a fibre network operator, so it will ask which FNO somebody is using early in the conversation
• It will direct people to our coverage map if they don’t know which FNOs are available to them
• It knows about DHCP vs PPPoE authentication and which FNOs use which – this helps with things like router setup instructions
• It knows Vumatel has two types of fibre lines (GPON and AE)
• If it generates a solution which involves a series of steps, like troubleshooting advice, it will offer to walk you through the solution step by step
• It will try to understand if it was helpful by asking if the problem was resolved towards the end of the conversation

What’s next

At this point it’s fairly self-contained – not connected to any other systems. A future version of the bot will ideally have access to relevant customer data for cases like: “Hi, what’s the status of my pending order?”

🤖 Ask our bot a question.