The setup itself is not the slow part. Most owners who take three weeks to get a website assistant live spend about four hours actually doing it, spread across twenty interrupted sessions, each of which starts with trying to remember where they left off.
So block an afternoon. Phone on silent, one browser window, a cup of tea. By the end you can have a receptionist answering visitors on your website from your own content, capturing enquiries and handing tricky conversations to a person.
A quick clarification before the clock starts, because the term gets used for two different products. This guide is about how to set up an AI receptionist for your website, meaning an assistant that answers people who type. It does not cover phone answering. SpideyChat works on websites only and does not take calls.
The afternoon at a glance
| Time | Stage | What you finish with |
|---|---|---|
| 13:00 | Gather | Price list, service area, 20 questions, key documents in one folder |
| 13:30 | Teach | Business description, website crawl, documents, Q&A pairs |
| 14:45 | Configure | Name, welcome message, colour, suggested prompts, actions |
| 15:30 | Install | Script tag on your site, visible on the right pages |
| 15:45 | Test | Twenty real past enquiries run through, fixes made |
| 16:45 | Go live | Team briefed, weekly review booked |
If your website is large or messy, add an hour to teaching. If you have no documents at all, you will save time there but spend it writing answers.
13:00 to 13:30: gather before you touch anything
Everything that slows setup down is a missing piece of information. Get these into one folder first:
- Your current price list, or price ranges if you quote per job.
- The areas, postcodes or regions you cover.
- Opening hours, including what happens on bank holidays.
- Your cancellation, deposit or refund terms.
- Twenty questions customers ask most often. Pull them from your sent emails, not memory.
- Any documents customers ask about: brochure, menu of services, onboarding guide, aftercare sheet.
Out-of-date documents are worse than none. If the brochure still lists last year's prices, leave it out.
13:30 to 14:45: teach it four ways
The assistant answers from what you give it, and there are four ways to give it that. Use more than one.
Describe the business in plain language. A few paragraphs: who you are, what you do, who you do it for, where, and what you do not do. That last part prevents a lot of awkward conversations.
Crawl your website. Point it at your site and it reads up to 150 pages. Check afterwards which pages came through, and remove any that are old blog posts about discontinued services. The crawler is listed from the Starter plan upward.
Upload documents. PDF, DOCX, TXT, CSV or Markdown. Your price list and terms are the most useful ones.
Add question and answer pairs. Take the 20 questions from your folder and write the answer the way you would say it to a customer. These take the longest and matter most, because they cover what your website never says. Writing Q&A pairs that sound like you has examples.
14:45 to 15:30: configure only what you need
Resist spending the afternoon on appearance. Set a name, a short welcome message that says what the assistant can help with, your brand colour and three or four suggested prompts that match your 20 questions.
Then turn to actions. Each is switched on per assistant, and all of them start switched off. Choose deliberately:
- Search the knowledge base. Switch on. This is how it answers from your content.
- Capture a lead. Switch on if someone will reply to leads promptly.
- Transfer to a human. Switch on if a team member can be marked on duty to take over from the inbox.
- Open a support ticket or send a webhook. Leave these for later unless you already know where tickets and lead data should go.
Booking requests are captured with the details attached for your team to confirm. The assistant does not write to your calendar, so make sure your welcome message and answers never say "you're booked".
15:30 to 15:45: install the script tag
Copy the script tag from your dashboard and paste it into your website's header or footer code setting. Most website builders have a box for exactly this. Save, publish, and load your site in a private browser window to confirm the chat appears.
If you only want it on certain pages at first, such as services and pricing, that is a sensible way to start. The docs cover placement on common site builders.
15:45 to 16:45: test with real enquiries
This hour is the one people skip, and it is the one that stops embarrassing conversations. Take 20 real past enquiries from your inbox and type them in as a visitor would, typos included. Add a few it should not answer. Here is one for a cleaning company, with an example price:
Visitor: hi do u do end of tenancy cleans in the north side and how much for a 2 bed
Assistant: Yes, we cover end of tenancy cleaning across the north side. A two-bedroom clean is priced from $180, depending on condition and whether you need oven and carpet cleaning. Would you like me to take your details so the team can confirm a date and a final price?
Check each answer against your price list. When it gets something wrong or says it does not know, fix the content, not the question. Rewording the test question until it passes teaches you nothing, because real visitors will not reword theirs.
Expect a handful of misses on the first run. Typically they come from something the business takes for granted, such as a minimum charge nobody wrote down or a service area that changed last year. Each fix is usually one new question and answer pair. Then try a question outside your business entirely and confirm it declines politely. Testing an assistant with real past enquiries goes further on building a test set.
16:45: before you close the laptop
Tell your team the assistant is live, what it can do and where captured leads and handovers appear. Mark who is on duty for live takeover. Then put a recurring 30-minute review in the calendar for the same time next week, where you read conversations and the unanswered questions list and add the missing answers.
If you would rather see a finished assistant before starting, the demo shows one working, and the launch checklist is worth printing and keeping beside you as you go.