FAQ - General Questions

Question: What do you do? OR What does Navu do?
Answer: Navu is a software company that helps marketing teams in B2B companies improve the results they get from their websites. This includes content and interactive guides that are added to the website to help visitors find your best content and the answers they are looking for. This also includes extensive first-party data about how visitors are behaving and performing on the site.

Question: What is this for?
Answer: This is designed to help a website visitor answer the questions they have without needing to speak to someone. Navu is founded on the principle that helping visitors to "self-serve" will lead to higher conversion rates and more qualified leads because visitors will educate themselves more fully and will be more satisfied when they do reach out to make contact.

Question: Does this use AI?
Answer: Yes. This interactive guide is built on top of the latest generative AI technology. It is trained using the content on the website so it is able to answer questions as long as the necessary information is somewhere on the site -- even if it has to assemble an answer from several different pages.

Question: Why does your chatbot look different than one others I've seen?
Answer: There is a quiet revolution going on as the world shifts toward AI. We believe in a new world where business websites consists of two parts -- the content, and the interactive "app" that can help the visitor find the answers they need. So we believe that visitors should typically see both at the same time -- at least when the screen size makes that feasible.

Question: Can I get something like this on my own website?
Answer: Absolutely! Contact us and we can probably have something running on your site within one business day.

Question: Why would I want an AI chatbot on my site?
Answer: Is there great content on the website that visitors are just unaware of? Absolutely. Will the navigation get them there? Maybe. But give a visitor a chance to ask exactly the question they have. They'll be delighted if they get the answer. It may have depended on that great content, but the visitor didn't have to go find it. So if your site has content that visitors aren't finding, a good AI chatbot may make all the difference.

Question: Why do you call this a "guide"?
Answer: We like to think that our primary customer is the website visitor. We want to do whatever will help them the most. Our job is not to try to trick a visitor into providing their identity. We trust that if they have a great experience and get the answers they are looking for, they will reach out and purchase when they are ready. So we call this a "guide" because we are there not only to lead the visitor to content, but also to answer their questions to the best of our ability -- just like a great tour guide.

Question: How much does this cost?
Answer: Pricing is simple. Our professional package includes (almost) everything. It costs $500 per month and there is no long-term commitment. You can cancel anytime you want with no penalty. That package is sufficient for most small-to-medium B2B business websites. We have no limits on website traffic. The package includes up to 5000 visitor questions and up to 2000 indexed pages on your site. If you have a lot of visitors and they ask a lot of questions, you can purchase additional questions in bundles of 1000 for $100. And you can purchase additional indexed pages at $100 per 1000 indexed pages per month.

Question: What is the implementation cost?
Answer: There is no implementation cost to get up and running with Navu.

Question: What happens if I exceed my monthly question limit?
Answer: If the number of questions asked by your visitors in a given month exceeds your monthly limit, the Navu sidebar will continue to answer questions for visitors without any additional cost. However, at the end of that month, Navu will reach out to you to make a plan about how to handle excesses in the future. The typical solution is to purchase more questions. For customers on the Pro plan, additional questions are available in groups of 1000 for $100. Customers on the Essentials plan cannot purchase more questions and will need to upgrade to the Pro plan. Customers on the Enterprise plan can purchase additional questions at their pre-negotiated rate. If you decide not to purchase additional questions and leave your current limits in place, then in subsequent months, the Navu Sidebar will stop answering questions when you hit the limit for that month.

Question: What happens if I have more than 2000 pages in my index?
Answer: If the number of pages in your index exceeds 2000 then you can purchase more indexed pages. For customers on the Pro plan, additional indexed pages are available in groups of 1000 for $100. Customers on the Essentials plan cannot purchase more indexed pages and will need to upgrade to the Pro plan. Customers on the Enterprise plan can purchase additional indexed pages at their pre-negotiated rate.

Question: What happens if I exceed my indexed page limit?
Answer: Navu will continue to index additional pages but will contact you to make a plan about how to handle the excess pages going forward. The typical solution is to purchase more indexed pages. Alternatively, you can choose not to increase your limit and Navu will only index and train its AI on pages up to the indexed page limit.

Question: How many questions are people going to ask?
Answer: Different sites have different visitor behavior. Start with the basic Professional package and we'll handle all of the questions you get. At the end of the first month, you can look at how many questions are being asked and decide on your budget. We also allow you to configure any limit you want on individual visitors in how many questions they can ask on any given day.

Question: How long does it take to get this on my site?
Answer: It's very simple. We'll prepare your site, which usually takes about one business day. Then we'll send you an embed code to add to your site (or instructions for our WordPress plugin if you use WordPress). As soon as that goes on, you can be up and running. If you want to check it out yourself before you release it to all of your visitors, let us know and we can set that up for you.

Question: Do you have a free trial?
Answer: Yes. After we send you your embed code, you'll have 14 days free before your first payment. You are free to cancel anytime before or after that.

Question: How do you compare with other AI chatbots?
Answer: There are old-fashioned chatbots that use "playbooks" to manage conversations. These are typically in a different category and are usually optimized for connecting visitors to live agents. Then there are the true AI chatbots that are trained to answer your questions. Some of these options are optimized for sales or support. Our guides are optimized for marketing -- meaning that we believe that our job is to provide the best possible answers to visitors based on the website content. We are not designed to offer specialized customer support or sales fulfillment functions. We do include the ability to intermediate chats between web visitors and people on your team using your internal chat system (Slack or Microsoft Teams). But we do not push visitors toward conversion. We really believe in "self-serve"! Another way in which we are different than other choices is that we are built on a model of audience segmentation. You decide what the different audiences are on your website. We take care of identifying which of these audiences any given visitor belongs to based on where they come from and what they do during their visits -- i.e, first-party data. We train the AI to deal with each visitor a little differently depending on which audience(s) they belong to.

Question: How much work is required on my part to get this on my site?
Answer: Almost nothing. Just add an embed code to each of your websites. (Yes, we allow you to have multiple subdomains within a single site under the Professional plan.) Later, when you are up and running, we'll fill you in on additional features in the product that you might want to take advantage of. For example, you may want to tell Navu about your audiences and choose which audiences will get special messages and behaviors.

Question: Can I choose different "voices" or "tones" for my bot?
Answer: We will soon be offering a variety of different choices.

Question: If I put this on my own website, do I have to worry about privacy issues?
Answer: We take great care to guard the privacy of all website visitors. If you offer a sidebar to your visitors, you should consider whether your current privacy policy is adequate or requires certain additions. We try to ensure that visitors are aware of the choices they are making and will direct them to your privacy policy.

Question: Can I see what people are asking and how the guide is responding?
Answer: Yes. We have an extensive system allowing you to dig into as much detail as you want. You can look at every visitor's journey. For any visitor who uses the guide or chat features, you can review their entire conversations. We also provide a complete record of all conversations in a simple CSV download.

Question: What else can Navu do for me other than this sidebar/guide/chatbot?
Answer: Navu tracks all visitors to the website in real-time and makes all of this data available to you. We also summarize all of this data in simple ways that will help you understand how the website is performing using a set of metrics designed specifically for B2B websites. These same analytics are available at the site level as well as for each of the audience you choose to define.

Question: Can I show the sidebar to only a subset of my visitors?
Answer: Yes. Just define any audiences that you want and change the settings so that the sidebar is available to any subset of those audiences that you choose.

Question: Does this include some way for my visitors to contact my sales and/or support team?
Answer: Yes. If you integrate Navu with your Slack, then we enable web visitors to request to chat with a live agent. We will announce the visitor's request on a designated channel. Then anyone with permission in Slack can reply to that message in a thread to initiate the chat. And anyone can participate in that thread if they have permission and choose to do so. Support for Microsoft Teams is also coming soon.

Question: Why do you talk about audience segmentation? Why is that important?
Answer: We believe that personalization begins at the audience level. Marketers have different stories to tell different audiences. We work hard to segment visitors into the correct audiences. Using that information, the guide can adapt to each audience differently. For example, when asked for a case study, two visitors in different audiences may be offered different case studies. Coming soon, you will also be able to provide direction to the AI for each audience about how to converse.

Question: What kind of data do you provide about what is going on with this sidebar and/or my website?
Answer: It starts simple. We'll keep a count of how many questions are being asked -- both for guides and for live chats. We'll tell you how many visitors are using guides and chat. You can look at how these numbers are changing over time. And you can see these same numbers broken down by audience. In addition, we collect a whole variety of other metrics about general behaviors -- including things like conversions, visitors, etc. So you can review all of the data that will tell you how well the whole site is performing. At the other end of the spectrum, we also provide real-time detailed tracking information about every visitor to your site. We do this in a way that is consistent with your privacy obligations to your visitors.

Question: How does the Navu Sidebar work with different languages? How many languages do you speak? Can you respond in different languages?
Answer: The Navu Sidebar can respond in multiple languages. The language used in the response is typically based on the language used for the question. The main languages supported are listed below. However, this list is always growing, so try asking a question in a language of your choice to see the appropriate response.
English
Spanish
French
Portuguese
Russian
Japanese
Chinese
Arabic
German
Italian
Dutch
And many more regional languages



Question: Is the sidebar designed to meet web accessibility standards? Are you designed to be accessible to web standards?
Answer: Yes. The sidebar and all Navu's web components are designed to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Question: How do you define "high value" vs "low value" visitors? What's the difference between a high and low value visitor?
Answer: Navu's analytics have the concept of qualified visitors. Qualified visitors are visitors who are not identified as bots and who take some modest action on the page they visit. The qualified threshold is there to identify visitors who have suggested by their activity some level of interest. Navu further divides qualified visitors into low and high value visitors. The threshold to be designated a high value visitor is configurable, but by default this requires a visit to at least 3 pages and aggregate activity time of more than 30 seconds. Visitors who fill in a form are also considered high value, independent of their activity or page visits. Qualified visitors who don't meet the threshold to be consider high value are designated as low value visitors.

Question: How new are you? How new is Navu? How new is the sidebar?
Answer: The Navu sidebar was first released in early December 2024. It is the latest product from Navu.co focused on providing an AI driven interactive, self educating experience for visitors to B2B websites.

Question: What is Navu's vision? Why should I use Navu? Why should I use the sidebar?
Answer: AI is changing everything everywhere. B2B marketing is no exception.

Navu is focused on how AI will affect B2B websites and the experience of prospects during their buyer journey.

The B2B web is undergoing a transformation. A visitor to a B2B website used to get a "read-only" experience. AI is changing that. Now a visitor can start having a dialog BEFORE they decide to talk to the sales team. Visitors have a lot of questions and they don't have the patience to search through all of the content to find the answers.

This is a huge win-win opportunity. Visitors get answers to their questions earlier in the buyer journey. The marketing team gets a goldmine of information they were unable to get before. What questions are these prospects asking? Which of these questions are hitting gaps in the website content? Which are the best questions to qualify a lead?

Navu makes this all simple and quick:
AI Sidebar: Help visitors to educate themselves by giving them a modern AI experience that still has your content at its heart, both in terms of training and citations. The AI sidebar is trained on your content only and always references your content in its answers.
Goldmine of data from anonymous visitors: Until now marketers knew very little about anonymous visitors other than what pages they visited. Now they have insights into what visitors are asking about before they even convert. This is immensely valuable for marketers to understand their visitor's buying signals as well as identifying where their site may fall short in providing the information their visitors are looking for.
Easy: The sidebar is easy to configure and easy to maintain. The sidebar can be fully trained and live on a website in hours. And, Navu's indexing technology, ensures the AI is retrained on any new content or changes to existing content in minutes.


Question: Can you used for B2C types of businesses? Does the sidebar work for B2C websites? Does Navu work for B2C websites?
Answer: Fundamentally, the Navu sidebar will work on B2C websites. However, it is optimized for B2B websites. B2C websites may require integrations into backend inventory or ticketing systems that the sidebar may not currently support.



Question: Is this how the sidebar would look on our website? Can I control how the sidebar looks?
Answer: Yes, the sidebar is highly configurable. The sidebar's features, the AI assistant, search, contact form, live chat are all individually configurable. Furthermore, the behavior of the sidebar in terms of when it opens and closes is also configurable. Lastly, the styling of the sidebar can be controlled by a few simple settings, but for those looking for fine grained control of the sidebar style, a full developers guide exists documenting how to fully customize its appearance.

Question: Is the side bar closeable by the end user? Can visitors close the sidebar?
Answer: Yes. The X at the top right of the sidebar will collapse the sidebar down to a floating button. Clicking on the button will re-open the sidebar. The icon in the floating button is configurable.

Question: Feels like my competitors could use the sidebar to just drill down on my value prop and give them a roadmap to leapfrogging us? Isn't it bad that my competitors can get access to critical information about my product from the sidebar?
Answer: Recall that you have tight control over the content that the sidebar AI is trained on. By default this is the content available on your public website which is already available to your competitors. If there is specific content that you don't want the sidebar AI to be trained on, that is easy to control via the Navu portal.

Question: Can I complete a purchase on the website?
Answer: No. You cannot purchase the Navu sidebar via the this website. However, you can complete the demo and trial process without having to talk to anyone one in sales. Simply request a demo via the Contact button above and we'll send you a link to a live demo. From there you can simply request a trial and we'll send you the Navu embed code and instructions on how to install Navu on your site. The full process is documented here.

Question: If a website visitor does not interact with the sidebar, will it still collect any information from them? That is, does the tool collect some information from all visitors to our site, such as the IP address they are coming from? What information does Navu collect about the visitor?
Answer: Navu can be configured to collect the IP address of each visitor as well as the information from each form fill. By default, IP address collection is enabled, but this can be disabled. By default, form fill information collection is disabled, but this can be enabled.

Question: How does threading work with respect to visitor conversations?
Answer: A conversation is a sequence of questions and answers from a unique visitor. The sidebar maintains a single thread for each visitor conversation. This means that the context within each conversation (thread) is maintained and that context influences the response to subsequent questions in that conversation. There is however, no context overlap between conversations. With each conversation being in an independent thread there is no risk of information or context from one visitor conversation influencing another.

Question: Are responses contextual?
Answer: Yes, responses are contextual. Each response is in the context of the conversation of which it is part. Each question is part of a visitor's conversation, the conversation is unique. Each unique visitor's conversation has its own thread and context which means that previous questions and answers within that conversation influence subsequent answers within that conversation. However, as there is a single thread per conversation, there is no overlap between conversations. So, questions and their responses are contextual within a specific conversation.

Question: Is each question its own conversation, with no memory of previous questions?
Answer: No. Each question is part of a series of questions in a conversation. The AI has a single thread for each conversation and as such remembers previous questions and answers within that conversation such that they influence answers to subsequent questions in that conversation. There is however, no thread (context) overlap between conversations. With each conversation being in an independent thread there is no risk of information or context from one visitor conversation influencing another.