What is suggested questions?

Suggested questions are tappable buttons shown with the greeting, before the visitor has typed. Tapping one sends it as the first message. Vendors also call them conversation starters, starter prompts, quick replies or default suggestions. They are the simplest piece of conversation design: three short questions that tell the visitor what to ask and spare them the typing.

They matter because they steer the first message, and the first message decides whether the conversation starts with a good answer or a fallback. The right suggestions are questions your content answers reliably and that visitors actually ask, in the visitor's words: "Do you ship to Canada?" rather than "International shipping policy". They also set the register, since a suggestion phrased casually invites casual questions. Good suggestions differ by industry, which is why the 40 starter prompts are grouped that way.

Where the idea runs out: suggestions are a hint, not a menu, and a generative agent must still handle whatever is typed instead. Too many buttons turn the chat into a decision tree and defeat the point of an open text box. A suggestion the content answers badly is worse than none, because it advertises a weakness. Review them whenever the content or the season changes; a Black Friday returns question in March is a small embarrassment that costs nothing to fix.