AI Sales Assistant for Service Business

Challenge

A service business was losing qualified leads because response time averaged 4, 6 hours. Visitors who filled in a contact form expected fast acknowledgement; by the time a sales rep replied, many had moved on. The team also spent significant time on leads that were clearly outside budget or scope, conversations that should never have been escalated to a human.

Options Considered

1. Live chat widget with human agents, immediate, but required staffing around the clock. Expensive and impractical outside business hours.
2. Rule-based chatbot (Intercom, Drift), fast to deploy, but rigid decision trees broke under unexpected questions and produced a poor experience for anything outside the happy path.
3. LLM-powered qualification agent with CRM integration: chosen. Handles open-ended conversations naturally, enforces a qualification script without feeling scripted, and writes directly to the CRM on completion.

Decision

An AI agent embeds on the website and opens a conversation when a visitor shows purchase intent (time on page, scroll depth, pricing page visit). The agent asks about the project, budget range, and preferred timeline. On completion it creates a CRM contact and deal, sends a personalised email follow-up summarising the conversation, and offers a calendar link for a discovery call.

Implementation

The agent runs on GPT-4 with a structured qualification prompt that extracts budget, timeline, and project type as typed fields. A function-calling layer writes the extracted data to the CRM via API, with no manual data entry. The follow-up email is drafted by the same LLM using the conversation transcript and sent via the email provider's API within seconds of the conversation ending. Calendar booking uses Calendly's embed API; the agent surfaces the link when the lead qualifies.

Human handoff is triggered when the lead score exceeds a threshold or when the visitor explicitly asks to speak to a person. The conversation and CRM record are forwarded to the sales rep with full context.

Outcome

First-response time dropped from hours to under 30 seconds. Unqualified leads reaching the sales team fell by over 60%. Qualified leads arrived in the CRM with budget, timeline, and project summary pre-filled, call preparation time cut to near zero.