If you are a developer helping a small business (a friend's shop, a family firm, a client) evaluate an agency, this is the checklist I would hand over before go-live. It is short on purpose.
It also works as a filter when an owner asks you to help pick the best AI automation agency in Mumbai for small businesses with no in-house tech person: ask each shortlisted agency how they handle every line.
1. A kill switch the owner can use
# feature flags, readable by a non-developer
auto_draft_replies: true # assistant drafts, staff approve
auto_send_ack: true # instant "we got your message"
auto_send_status: false # order status replies (off until tested)
The owner must be able to flip these without calling anyone. Test it: turn one off, send a message, confirm nothing automated goes out.
2. A fallback for every automated step
| Step | If it fails |
|---|---|
| Draft reply | Message goes to the shared inbox untouched |
| CRM write | Row goes to a "failed writes" sheet with the raw payload |
| Status lookup | Customer gets "a person will reply shortly" |
No step should fail silently.
3. Alerts a human will actually see
Email alerts get ignored. For small teams, an alert to the owner's WhatsApp or a single daily summary works better. Define three levels: info (daily summary), warning (something retried), error (something did not happen and a customer may be waiting).
4. A log you can read
2026-10-20 10:42 IST in +91XXXXXX1234 "price for 2 cartons?"
2026-10-20 10:42 IST draft faq:bulk_pricing -> needs approval
2026-10-20 10:51 IST sent approved_by=reena
Plain text, one line per event, timestamps in local time.
5. A rollback plan
Before go-live, write down how to return to the old way in five minutes. If nobody can, the launch is not ready.
6. A named owner on both sides
One person at the business, one at the agency, both reachable during business hours.
Using it
Paste this into the agency conversation and ask them to answer each item in writing. The answers tell you whether monitoring is real or just a word on a slide. For the step before this one, see the pre-build audit walkthrough.
I run NxFlowAI (Mumbai). Examples are illustrative.
Top comments (0)