AI Pre-Sales Chatbot for Trade Businesses

Most customers visit your website at 10pm when you’re not answering the phone. They want to know if you cover their area, roughly what it costs, and how quickly you can come out. If they can’t get those answers immediately, they move on to the next result.

An AI chatbot trained on your services, pricing, and FAQs answers those questions instantly — and captures the lead while you sleep. It embeds on any trade website as a WhatsApp-style widget. By the time you check your phone in the morning, you’ve already got a name, number, and a summary of what they need.

What’s included

Everything below is standard. The only variable is what you train the bot on — your services, your prices, your service area. The more you give it, the better it answers.

• AI trained on your services, prices, trade areas, and common customer questions
• Lead capture flow: collects customer name, email, phone number, and job type
• WhatsApp-style chat widget embedded on your website
• Leads synced to a Notion database — you see the full conversation before you call back
• Optional email notification on each new lead
• Monthly content updates if your services or prices change
• Hosted on our UK VPS — runs 24/7 with no downtime

How it works

Who the chatbot is for

The pre-sales chatbot suits any trade business where customers ask the same questions before booking — plumbers, electricians, builders, roofers, landscapers, gardeners, and cleaning companies. If you get the same five questions every week, a chatbot trained on your answers handles them automatically so you don’t have to.

It makes most sense once you already have a working website with a service list and some traffic. If you don’t have a website yet, the web design for tradesmen guide covers what a trade site needs to get right first.

• Trade businesses that get enquiries outside working hours
• Anyone who finds themselves answering the same WhatsApp questions on repeat
• Sole traders too busy on jobs to respond quickly to website visitors
• Businesses that want leads qualified before they pick up the phone

AI chatbot vs the alternatives

Most trade businesses rely on one of three things to handle after-hours enquiries: nothing, WhatsApp, or a live chat widget. The full breakdown of how each option compares is worth understanding before deciding.

Pricing

The £297 setup covers building the knowledge base, training the bot on your services, testing it against real questions, and deploying it to your site. The monthly fee covers UK VPS hosting, uptime monitoring, and knowledge base updates whenever your services or prices change.

No minimum contract. Cancel the monthly with one month’s notice — the chatbot widget simply stops responding. One extra enquiry per month more than covers the running cost.

How it’s built

The bot runs on Claude Haiku — one of the fastest AI models available, purpose-built for exactly this kind of conversational use. It’s connected to a knowledge base built from your service list, prices, and FAQs. I update the knowledge base whenever your services change, so the bot always reflects your current offering.

The widget is a lightweight script that embeds in any website with two lines of code. It runs on our UK VPS — no third-party platforms, no data leaving the country, no dependencies on external services going down. Leads sync to Notion via API on every conversation.

What clients say about AJ Web Design

Frequently asked questions

These are the questions I get most from trade businesses looking at the pre-sales chatbot.

Cambridge AI chatbot for trade businesses

I build and maintain AI chatbots for trade businesses across Cambridge, Ely, Huntingdon, St Ives, St Neots, Newmarket, Peterborough, Saffron Walden, Royston, Bury St Edmunds, and the surrounding areas. All work is handled remotely — I just need your service list and a few common customer questions to get started.