How We Added an AI Customer Support Assistant to Our Own Website

Any business that supports customers outside office hours knows the problem: someone visits the site at 11pm with a quick question, and if they can't get an immediate answer, they leave. A WhatsApp button helps, but only if someone is awake to reply.

That's why we added a help widget to axxyss.com with two options: direct WhatsApp for those who prefer to talk to a person, and an AI-powered chat that instantly answers common questions about our services, available around the clock.

The problem it solves

Most visits to a professional services website arrive with very similar questions: what kind of projects do you do, do you work with clients outside Spain, how do I get in touch? Answering those questions doesn't require a human — it requires instant availability.

The typical alternatives have real drawbacks for a small business or freelancer:

• A traditional live chat requires someone online, or the visitor waits with no reply.
• AI helpdesk platforms (like Intercom, x-bees or similar) come with fixed monthly fees, built for support volumes a small business doesn't need.
• A contact form works, but it doesn't give the sense of immediate response that a visitor browsing on mobile expects.

The solution we built combines the best of both worlds: an AI assistant to answer questions instantly, with a direct WhatsApp option for whenever a visitor prefers — or needs — to talk to a real person.

How it works from the visitor's side

When someone lands on the site, a floating help button appears. Clicking it opens a small widget with two paths:

1. Type a question directly — the assistant replies within seconds, in whichever language it's addressed in (Spanish, English or French), with real information about our services: Django web development, server administration, custom management software.
2. Switch to WhatsApp — one click away, for anyone who prefers to continue the conversation more personally or directly.

The assistant doesn't make things up: if it doesn't have the exact answer (a specific quote, for example), it points the visitor straight to WhatsApp or the contact form instead of guessing.

Why we chose this over a third-party platform

Ready-made platforms for this exist — Chatwoot is a solid example, open-source and self-hostable. But for a site with a moderate volume of inquiries, building a lightweight assistant of our own, connected directly to the Anthropic API, had several advantages:

• Near-zero real cost — using an affordable model (Claude Haiku), dozens of conversations cost fractions of a cent, well below any fixed monthly plan.
• Full control over context — the assistant knows exactly which services we offer, where we work, and the tone we want to convey, because we defined it ourselves.
• Native integration — being part of the Django project itself, it doesn't depend on third-party scripts or a separate management dashboard.

Technical details: how it's built

For anyone curious about the implementation (or managing a similar Django project), here's the architecture at a high level:

Backend

A small Django app exposes an endpoint that receives the visitor's message and forwards it to the Claude API along with a system prompt that gives context about the company: which services we offer, where we work, and how the assistant should behave (tone, language, what it should never make up).

Abuse protection

Like any public endpoint that consumes a paid API, it needs protection:

• Human verification with Cloudflare Turnstile before enabling the chat, to filter out bots.
• Message limits per session and per IP address, to prevent someone from draining the API budget with automated requests.
• A monthly spend limit set directly on the API account, as an additional safety net.

Frontend

The widget is lightweight HTML and JavaScript, no extra frameworks — it's built directly into the site's base template, so it appears consistently across every page, in all three languages of the site.

Interested in something similar for your business?

If you run a website on Django, WordPress, or any other stack, and want an assistant like this — tailored to your business, without unnecessary monthly fees — get in touch through the contact form or try it yourself with the help button on this very page.