Answering Guest Questions

Guests have questions before they inquire: parking, dietary accommodations, whether the patio is open, what the minimum spend is on a Saturday. Paloma answers those questions inside your booking widget so guests don’t have to email and wait. This page covers how that works, how you control the answers, and how to keep them sharp over time.

How guests ask questions

Alongside the inquiry flow in your booking widget, there’s an Ask a Question entry point. A guest taps it and a short chat opens. They type their question, Paloma answers in your venue’s voice, and the conversation happens right there in the widget. No email, no waiting.

Paloma’s answers come from a small corpus of information about your venue. Your public website goes in as background context, and on top of that sits your Q&A library: the question-and-answer pairs you’ve authored or approved. When a guest’s question matches one of those pairs, your wording is what comes back.

Underneath the chat box, guests see a row of suggested questions they can tap instead of typing. Your saved responses help feed those suggestions, so the more questions you’ve covered, the more your widget can answer with one tap.

Your Q&A library

The Q&A library is the set of question-and-answer pairs Paloma uses to reply to guests. Each entry is a question (in a standardized form) and a clean answer in your voice.

You manage the library from the Q&A tab in your dashboard, which opens the Guest Questions and Answers page. The page has two tabs:

There’s a second way into the same library: from Settings → Responses for a specific venue. The settings page is per-venue and adds two controls the main Q&A page doesn’t: Import CSV, for bulk-seeding from a spreadsheet, and Export All, for pulling your current library out. Both pages edit the same underlying entries.

If you run more than one venue, every entry in the library belongs to a specific venue. An answer about parking at one location won’t be used on another. The page lets you filter by venue at the top.

Adding and editing answers

Adding a response

From the Saved Responses tab, click Add Response. (If you run multiple venues, the button opens a menu so you can pick which venue the answer is for.) Fill in the question in its standardized form (“Do you have parking?”) and the answer you want guests to see, then save. The answer is live on the next guest conversation.

The empty state on the Saved Responses tab also points you at the alternative: from the Recent Questions tab, you can turn an actual guest question into a saved response with one click, instead of starting from a blank form.

Editing an answer

Find the entry in Saved Responses (the search box matches against both the question and the answer text), click to open it, edit the answer, and save. The new wording goes live right away.

You can edit the question text too, but we’ll ask you to confirm first. Small wording fixes are fine. Larger changes can throw off the “how many times has this been asked” count, since the meaning of the question is what we match against, not the exact letters.

Improve with AI

When you have a rough draft of an answer, or one that says the right thing but doesn’t quite sound like you, click Improve with AI. A guidance box opens with a starter prompt (“Keep it warm and concise. Match our friendly, professional tone and avoid jargon.”) that you can keep, edit, or clear. Click Improve.

Paloma rewrites the answer, fixes grammar and tone, strips any internal language, and won’t invent facts. The new wording lands back in the answer field so you can read it, tweak it, and save. If you don’t like the rewrite, leave the original in place and save that instead.

Evaluate Response

Next to Improve with AI, there’s an Evaluate Response button that grades your current answer without changing it. We tell you whether it reads as well-answered or could use improvement, and explain why. Use it as a sanity check before you save, or to compare two phrasings.

Removing a response

Open the entry and click Remove. The Q&A drops out of your library and won’t be used for future guest questions. Historical guest questions that were answered with this response stay on the record as they were. They just won’t be answered the same way next time.

Keeping your answers current

Guests ask new things all the time. The dashboard helps you spot what’s coming up so your library can grow with it.

Recent Questions tab

The Recent Questions tab on the Q&A page shows the actual questions guests asked in your widget, newest first. Each row shows the question text, the venue, the answer Paloma gave on the spot, and a quality flag:

Use the filter row to focus on Could Use Improvement, work through the list, and click any question to open the editor. The original guest question and our attempt sit at the top, and there’s a place to write a stronger answer. Save, and it joins your Saved Responses for next time.

The same library powers all future widget conversations, so a single edit ripples forward without any re-publishing step.

Weekly summary email

Each week, the summary email Paloma sends to your team includes a Recent Questions section: a roll-up of what guests asked recently, with a link straight back into the dashboard editor for each one. If you don’t get to the Q&A tab between summaries, the email is your nudge.

Recurring questions are de-duplicated automatically. The same question asked four ways by four guests becomes one entry, so you only have to write one answer.

Importing from a spreadsheet

If you already have a list of FAQs in a spreadsheet, a Google Doc, or a section of your contract, you can bring it in all at once instead of typing each one.

From Settings → Responses for the venue you want to seed, click Import CSV and upload a file with two columns: question text and answer text. Each row becomes a saved response. You can review and edit any of them after import.

You can also click Export All on the same page to download your current library as a CSV. Useful for a backup, for sharing with a teammate, or for editing in bulk somewhere else and re-importing.

Common scenarios

A guest asked something we don’t have an answer for

Open the Recent Questions tab, filter to Could Use Improvement, and find the question. Open it, write a good answer in the editor, and save. The next guest who asks something similar gets your answer instantly.

An answer is out of date

A price changed, a policy moved, a vendor is no longer one you work with. Open Saved Responses, search for the answer, click to edit, fix the text, save. The next widget conversation uses the new wording.

We added something new (a private dining room, a tasting menu)

Add a saved response from scratch. Phrase the question the way a guest would (“Do you have a private dining room?”) and describe the offering in the answer. Each saved response also feeds the row of tappable suggestions under the chat box, so guests see the new option without having to know to ask.

A few things worth knowing

• Saving is enough. There’s no publish step. Once you save, the answer is available to the widget on the next guest conversation.
• Each venue has its own library. If you run multiple venues, you maintain a separate library for each one and pick which one to author for when you add a response.
• We try not to make things up. When Paloma doesn’t have a confident answer, we say so rather than guess. That’s what keeps the widget worth using.

Any questions? Email us at contact@palomaparties.com or book a meeting.