Most owners who set up a website assistant start in the wrong place. They paste in the website address, pick a brand colour and switch it on. Two weeks later they are irritated that it spends half its time answering questions about parking and never seems to bring in the jobs they actually want.
Usually nothing is wrong with the software. Nobody decided what the job was.
You would not hire a receptionist by handing over a key and saying "deal with whoever turns up". You would write down, even roughly, what the role is for, what good looks like and what they must never do. An ai employee job description does the same work. It takes about an hour, and it makes every later decision (what to teach it, which actions to switch on, how to judge it) far easier.
One sentence of purpose
A real job description opens with why the role exists. Keep yours to a single sentence and make it about an outcome.
Weak: "Answer customer questions on the website."
Better: "Turn evening and weekend website visitors into named enquiries with enough detail for us to quote or ring back the next working morning."
The second version does a lot of quiet work. It says the assistant is judged on named enquiries, not on how many chats it holds. It tells you when it matters most. And it rules things out: this role is not there to handle refunds or talk someone through a warranty claim.
If you find you need two sentences, you may have two roles. A sales assistant on the pricing page and a support assistant on the help pages can each have their own description, and they will both be better for it.
Responsibilities you could watch someone do
Next, list the duties. Write each one as a task a person could observe. "Provide excellent service" cannot be checked by anyone. "Answer questions about service areas from the coverage page" can.
Here is a sample for a small garden landscaping firm. Swap in your own trade.
- Answer common questions about services, the area covered, typical lead times and how quoting works, using the website and the services brochure.
- Qualify new enquiries by asking the type of project, rough size of the garden, postcode and whether there is a budget in mind.
- Capture the enquiry with a name, a phone number or email, and a short summary once the visitor wants a quote or a site visit.
- Admit what it does not know and take the visitor's details rather than guessing.
- Pass existing-job conversations to a person whenever someone on the team is available.
Each of those lines maps onto something you can really configure. In SpideyChat, actions such as knowledge search, lead capture, support tickets, webhooks and transfer to a human are switched on per assistant and are off by default, so the responsibilities list doubles as your checklist of which ones to turn on. The features page shows what each does.
If a duty on your list has no matching setting or content, that is useful to discover now. Either you need to write the content, or the duty belongs to a person.
What good looks like after a month
People skip this section and regret it. Without agreed measures you end up judging the assistant on whichever number looks best that week, or on one annoying conversation a colleague forwarded.
| Measure | Where you see it | A sensible first target |
|---|---|---|
| Named enquiries captured | Leads list | Compare with last month's contact form submissions |
| Unanswered questions | Knowledge gaps | Fewer each week as you fill them |
| Quality of enquiry notes | Your team's opinion | Someone can call back without re-asking the basics |
| Visitor ratings | Analytics | Read every poor rating, not just the average |
| Handover requests | Inbox | Answered by a person within the time you promise |
Notice there are no invented benchmarks in that table. Your baseline is your own business last month. For more on reading these numbers without fooling yourself, see the metrics that prove your chatbot is generating leads.
The boundaries section, which matters most
Duties tell the assistant what to do. Boundaries stop it causing trouble. For most small firms the list is short and blunt:
It must never give a firm price for work that needs a site visit. It must never promise a start date. It must not comment on complaints, disputes or another customer's job beyond taking details. It must not offer opinions on planning rules, and should point to the local council instead.
A good assistant already leans the right way, because it answers from the content you supply and says so when that content has nothing relevant. But writing the boundaries down means you can put them into the instructions explicitly, and test them. Here is what it should look like when a visitor pushes:
Visitor: It's about 40 square metres of patio, just give me a price.
Assistant: I can't give a firm price without someone seeing the site, because levels and access change the cost a lot. Most patio projects start with a free survey visit. If you share your postcode and a good number, I'll pass this to the team to arrange one.
That answer holds the line without being unhelpful, and it still ends in a captured enquiry.
Who it reports to
Every job description names a manager. Yours should name three people, even if they are all you:
- Who receives new enquiries and how fast they act on them.
- Who is on duty to take over live conversations, and during which hours.
- Who reviews transcripts each week and fixes the gaps.
Point three is where most assistants quietly decline. Nobody reads the conversations, the same unanswered question comes up forty times, and the owner concludes the thing does not work. A short, fixed routine prevents that, and we set one out in a weekly review routine for supervising your AI employee.
Turn the page into a setup this week
Write the description first, on paper or in a document, before you open any settings. Then use it in this order. Put the purpose sentence and the boundaries into the assistant's persona and instructions. Use the responsibilities list to decide what content to upload and which actions to switch on, leaving the rest off. Put the success measures in your calendar as a check-in four weeks from launch.
After that, treat the first fortnight like any new starter's induction. Onboarding an AI employee covers how to widen its duties gradually. If you want to see how a scoped assistant behaves before committing, the free plan at /signup is enough to test one role against your own description.