Post-conference website chat agent that turns education trade show badge scans into booked meetings and separates institutional buyers from parents and students on Salesforce

What The Booth Follow-Through does

A small education and training provider (programs and a learning platform sold to school districts, colleges and corporate training teams) exhibits at several education conferences a year. Reps come home with hundreds of badge scans, then go straight back to existing deals, and the scan file sits in a spreadsheet or exhibitor app for weeks. By the time anyone follows up, the buyer's planning window for the next term has often closed. On top of that, the website chat is flooded with parents and students asking about enrollment, logins and schedules, which buries the institutional buyers. This agent works for the sales team and owns three things: getting every event contact into Salesforce and a personalized follow-up within a day, running the chat conversation when those contacts (and any other visitors) come to the site, and handing qualified institutional buyers to the right rep with a booked meeting and full context. It owns audience triage too, keeping parents and students out of sales calendars and pointing them to the right place without collecting anything that touches student records.

Custom build

The team runs Salesforce, so the right choice is a custom AI build that writes into their existing leads, campaigns and campaign member statuses rather than a chat tool tied to a different CRM. A custom AI agent can carry the per-contact booth context, apply education-specific triage and FERPA redaction rules that off-the-shelf chat widgets do not handle well, and reason over a term calendar when qualifying. n8n handles the event list ingestion and Salesforce sync without per-task costs spiking after a big show, Chili Piper gives reliable segment and territory routing with a preferred-rep rule for booth contacts, and FullEnrich fills gaps in sparse badge data. For a team of this size this keeps the stack small and maintainable while closing the gap between the booth and the first meeting.

What starts it

• A badge scan export or exhibitor app sync lands after a conference day
• A visitor opens an event-specific follow-up page or clicks a personalized link from the post-event email
• A visitor on the main site asks about programs, pricing, implementation or a demo
• A known event contact from an identified institution returns to the site without having booked
• An event lead in Salesforce reaches 5 business days with no logged activity or meeting

What it reads

• Salesforce leads, contacts, accounts, campaigns and campaign member status (including event campaigns per conference)
• Badge scan exports and rep booth notes from the exhibitor lead capture app
• Approved knowledge base: program catalog, implementation timelines, LMS and SIS integration notes, accreditation statements, published data privacy and FERPA statement
• Term and enrollment calendar by segment (K-12 fiscal year and board cycles, higher ed term starts, corporate budget quarters)
• Rep territories, segment ownership and calendars via Chili Piper
• Company-level visitor identification from Leadfeeder (Dealfront) to recognize returning districts and colleges

When a person takes over

• Any question about student data, data sharing agreements, FERPA terms or security reviews goes to the rep and the person who owns privacy and contracts. The agent shares only the published privacy statement and books the call.
• Pricing, quotes, purchase orders, RFPs or cooperative purchasing contracts are handed to the owning rep, because pricing depends on seat counts, multi-year terms and procurement rules the agent should not negotiate.
• Multi-campus districts, university systems or state agencies are flagged for the sales lead to assign personally instead of round-robin routing, since these deals often span several reps' booth contacts.
• A frustrated parent, a student who appears to be a minor in distress, or any safeguarding concern is passed immediately to the designated staff contact with no sales follow-up attached.

Rules it follows

• FERPA: the agent never asks for, stores or repeats student-identifiable information (student names, IDs, grades, schedules, records). If a visitor types it in, the agent stops, tells them not to share student records in chat, redacts it from the transcript before it reaches Salesforce, and points them to the proper secure channel.
• Parents and students are never added to sales campaigns, outbound sequences or rep calendars, and anyone who says they are under 18 is not captured as a lead at all.
• No promises on pricing, accreditation outcomes, credit transfer, funding eligibility or implementation dates beyond what the approved content states.
• Event personalization only uses what was recorded in the badge scan and booth notes. The agent never invents a conversation, a person the visitor met, or an interest they did not express.
• Every follow-up honors unsubscribe and consent status in Salesforce, and chat transcripts are retained under the same policy as other prospect records.

How you know it works

• Time from the end of a conference to first personalized touch on every badge scan (target: within one business day)
• Share of event leads with a chat conversation or booked meeting within 14 days of the event
• Meetings booked directly from chat, split by segment and by event campaign
• Pipeline created from event campaigns in Salesforce, compared with prior conferences
• Misrouted conversations (parents or students reaching sales calendars, or buyers sent to support), reviewed weekly

From pilot to live

1. Pilot on the next conferenceLoad the approved knowledge base and term calendar, build the badge-scan-to-Salesforce workflow in n8n, and launch event pages and chat for one upcoming conference only. Reps review every transcript and handoff for the first two weeks, and audience triage rules are tuned against real parent and student traffic.
2. Expand to the full websiteTurn on the agent across program and pricing pages, add Leadfeeder (Dealfront) recognition for returning institutions, switch on the 5-day straggler digest, and apply the same flow to every conference on the calendar, including back-catalog scans from recent events that were never followed up.
3. Run and maintain through the academic yearThe agent is kept working on an ongoing basis: knowledge updated when programs or prices change, the term calendar refreshed each cycle, routing adjusted when territories shift, Salesforce field mappings checked after any admin changes, and transcripts sampled monthly for accuracy, FERPA compliance and misroutes before peak enrollment and budget seasons.