IllumiChat - AI-Powered Chat Platform

Overview

A sales assistant helps your website visitors get immediate answers to product questions, qualifies them as potential leads, and captures their contact information — all without requiring a human sales rep to be online. This guide walks you through creating and deploying one from scratch.

What You Will Build

By the end of this guide, you will have:

An AI assistant with a sales-focused system prompt
A knowledge base loaded with your product information
An embeddable widget configured with a lead capture form
Analytics to monitor lead quality and conversation performance

Step-by-Step Setup

Create the Assistant

Go to your workspace and click New Assistant. Give it a name like “Sales Assistant” or your company name followed by “Sales.”

Write the System Prompt

The system prompt defines how your assistant behaves. For a sales assistant, focus on being helpful, asking qualifying questions, and guiding visitors toward next steps.Here is a template you can customize:

You are a friendly and knowledgeable sales assistant for [Company Name].
Your goal is to help website visitors understand our products and services,
answer their questions accurately, and guide qualified prospects toward
next steps.

Key behaviors:
- Be warm, professional, and conversational
- Answer product questions using your knowledge base
- Ask clarifying questions to understand the visitor's needs
- When appropriate, suggest scheduling a demo or speaking with sales
- If you don't know something, say so honestly and offer to connect
  them with the team
- Never make up pricing, features, or commitments

Qualifying questions to naturally work into the conversation:
- What problem are they trying to solve?
- How many team members would use the product?
- What is their timeline for making a decision?
- Have they used similar products before?

When a visitor seems qualified (clear need, reasonable timeline, decision-making
authority), encourage them to fill out the contact form or schedule a demo.

Connect a Knowledge Base

Create a project and upload your product documentation, pricing pages, FAQ documents, feature comparisons, and case studies. Then connect the project to your sales assistant.The assistant uses this knowledge base to answer product-specific questions accurately rather than making up information.Good content to upload:

Product feature descriptions
Pricing tiers and comparison tables
FAQ documents
Case studies and testimonials
Integration documentation
Competitor comparison sheets

Configure the Widget

Go to your assistant’s Widget Settings and configure:

Enable the widget — Toggle widget access on
Set allowed domains — Add your website domain(s)

Welcome message — Write a greeting that encourages engagement:

Hi there! I'm here to help you learn about [Product]. What brings you here today?

Suggested questions — Add 3-4 common questions visitors ask:
- “What does [Product] do?”
- “How much does it cost?”
- “Can I see a demo?”
- “How is this different from [Competitor]?”

Set Up Lead Capture

Enable the lead form in your widget settings. Configure the fields you want to collect:

Field	Recommended	Notes
Name	Yes	First and last name
Email	Yes (required)	Primary contact method
Phone	Optional	Useful for high-intent leads
Company	Recommended	Helps sales team prepare

Choose when the form appears:

After N messages — Show the form after the visitor has engaged (recommended: 3-5 messages)
On demand — Let visitors choose when to share their info

Deploy to Your Website

Add the widget script tag to your website:

<script
  src="https://widget.illumichat.com/v1/widget.js"
  data-assistant-id="your-assistant-id"
  data-primary-color="#6366F1"
  async
></script>

See the Widget Installation guide for platform-specific instructions.

Monitoring Performance

After deploying your sales assistant, monitor these metrics in the IllumiChat dashboard:

Metric	What It Tells You	Target
Conversations started	Widget engagement rate	Growing over time
Avg. messages per conversation	Depth of engagement	4-8 messages
Lead form completions	Conversion rate	10-30% of conversations
Response accuracy	Quality of answers	Review weekly

Improving Lead Quality

Refine the system prompt

If you are getting too many unqualified leads, add more qualifying criteria to the system prompt. If you are getting too few leads, make the prompt more encouraging and lower the bar for suggesting the contact form.

Update the knowledge base

Review conversations where the assistant could not answer a question. Add that information to your knowledge base to improve future responses.

Optimize suggested questions

Track which suggested questions lead to the highest conversion rates and prioritize those. Remove questions that lead to dead-end conversations.

Set up webhook notifications

Configure a webhook for the contact.created event to get instant notifications when a new lead is captured. Route these to your CRM or Slack channel for immediate follow-up.

Review your sales assistant’s conversations regularly. AI-generated responses should be factually accurate. If you notice the assistant making claims about pricing, features, or timelines that are incorrect, update your knowledge base and system prompt immediately.

Guides

Build a Sales Assistant

Overview

What You Will Build

Step-by-Step Setup

Monitoring Performance

Improving Lead Quality

Next Steps

Widget Customization

Webhooks

​Overview

​What You Will Build

​Step-by-Step Setup

​Monitoring Performance

​Improving Lead Quality

​Next Steps

Widget Customization

Webhooks

Overview

What You Will Build

Step-by-Step Setup

Monitoring Performance

Improving Lead Quality

Next Steps