Capturing leads after hours
Every form and every booking lands in the database whatever time it arrives, with the arrival time recorded. The phone is a different story, and the table below tells it.
- Forms and bookings, any hour
- Arrival time on the record
- Phone answering on the roadmap
The short answer
- Web forms and Calendly bookings reach your instance by webhook at any hour and become a contact, a lead with its source, and optionally an owned task waiting for the morning.
- The arrival timestamp is on the record, which turns a vague sense that evenings are busy into a number you can look at before you decide to staff them.
- Inbound calls are not answered. Phone numbers with routing, voicemail transcription, missed-call text-back and an AI receptionist are all on the roadmap, so an evening caller today reaches whatever you have already.
Trigger to logged
What happens to a 9pm enquiry from the moment it arrives.
- 1
Trigger: a form at 9pm
The website form posts to your instance's inbound endpoint. There is no business-hours condition on receiving; the endpoint answers whenever the visitor submits.
- 2
The record is written immediately
Contact created or matched on email, lead logged on the inbound channel with its source and its arrival time.
- 3
Spam is throttled
Repeated submissions from one source are throttled, which matters most overnight when a bot has hours and nobody is watching.
- 4
A task is queued for the morning
task_create with an owner and a due time. Sending an automatic reply outside your window is deliberately not something the product does today.
- 5
The human sees it first thing
The inbound queue, sorted by arrival. The overnight leads are the top of the list rather than buried in a shared mailbox.
- 6
What gets logged
The lead, the source, the timestamp and every touch after it. Enough to answer whether after-hours enquiries convert differently from daytime ones.
What gets configured
Three columns because the status column is the honest part.
| Object | What you set | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Inbound webhook | The endpoint your site form posts to | Available |
| Calendly booking webhook | Booking events, with a reconcile job for missed deliveries | Available |
| Spam throttle | Limits on repeat submissions from one source | Available |
| Lead source | Recorded on every inbound lead | Available |
| Morning task | Owner and due time for overnight leads | Available |
| Business-hours send window | Cadence sends held to your window | Available |
| Hosted forms at your own URL | Forms served by SalesCrew | On the roadmap |
| Missed-call text-back | SMS sent when a call goes unanswered | On the roadmap |
| AI receptionist | Answers, qualifies, books and transfers | On the roadmap |
Where it stops and a human starts
It stops at the phone. If most of your after-hours value arrives as a ringing telephone, the capture described here does not solve your problem, and the receptionist that would is on the roadmap rather than in the product.
It also stops at the reply. Cadence sends are held inside your business-hours window on purpose, so a step whose timer expires at 2am waits rather than arriving at 2am. Deciding to answer a person at 9pm is a human choice, not a default.
What the capture does buy you is a measurable question. Once arrival times sit on the records, you can see how much of your enquiry volume genuinely lands outside office hours before spending money on covering it.
Questions
- Does an AI answer my phone at night?
- No. There is no inbound answering today. Outbound calls work through Vapi, and the receptionist that answers, books and transfers is a roadmap item.
- Will a lead get an automatic acknowledgement?
- Not automatically. Automatic replies by SMS are on the roadmap, and cadence email is held to your business-hours window by design. A person can reply whenever they choose.
- How do I know if after-hours volume is worth staffing?
- Let the timestamps accumulate for a month and count. It is a cheap experiment and it beats deciding from the last memorable Saturday.