Leads
Turn buying interest from conversations into a pipeline your team can manage
Path: Communication > Leads
ReadyChatAI identifies contacts who show concrete buying interest while they write to your business. The Leads page places each of them on a pipeline: a row of stages that a lead moves through, from the first message to Won or Lost. Your team moves the cards, and the bot can help move them.
Leads does not replace Messages: the conversation stays there, where you read it and reply.
The page has two views, switched with the buttons at the top: Board and Results.
What becomes a lead
The bot looks for signs of commercial intent in the conversation: asking about a product or service, discussing a need, a budget or a preference, or moving toward a purchase or a booking. A contact with enough evidence is added to the board by itself.
New leads land on the pipeline's entry stage, the open stage marked Entry. There is no separate incoming list and nothing to accept. You can also have everyone who writes from an ad or comments on a post added, and you can add any contact by hand by choosing a stage for it in Messages. How leads enter a pipeline lists every case and explains which pipeline receives each lead.
Interest labels, headline and summary
Each card can show High interest, Medium interest or Went cold, a short line describing what the person wants, and when the customer last wrote. Opening the lead shows what the bot gathered in the conversation. The labels are a guide, not a guarantee.
They follow a fixed timeline when the customer goes quiet:
- A lead that reached High interest switches to Went cold after about 24 hours of silence.
- Any interest label disappears after about 7 days of silence.
The card does not move or leave the board when its label changes or disappears. A lead stays on its stage until someone, the bot or an automatic event moves it.
The label keeps updating when a person takes over
ReadyChatAI keeps reading what the customer writes while a person on your team is handling the conversation, and on a channel where automatic replies are turned off. The interest label, the headline and the summary keep updating in both cases, so a conversation your team answers by hand can still become a lead.
It is not read when the contact is blocked or marked as spam, when the message has no text (only an image or a sticker), or when your plan has no messages left and does not continue beyond its allowance. Playground conversations never become leads.
Work a lead on the board
- Move it: drag the card to another open stage, forward or backward.
- Close it: drag it onto Won or Lost in the Closings area.
- Decline it: cards on the entry stage have a menu with Decline lead, for a contact that is not a lead at all. The contact and its conversation are not deleted, but it is never added to the board again automatically, even if it shows new interest. To work it again, choose a stage for it from its conversation in Messages.
- Open it: select a card to see the customer's data, the pipeline, stage and owner, the timeline of every change with Undo on the latest move, and Go to conversation.
The Leads board covers each of these, the filters and the limit of 50 cards per column.
What moves a lead besides you
- The bot. Each pipeline chooses how the bot moves contacts: you move them yourself, the bot suggests a move for you to Accept or Ignore, or the bot moves them automatically. The bot never marks a lead as Won or Lost, never moves one backward, and only suggests for a lead a person already moved by hand.
- Automatic events. A stage can receive contacts whose order or appointment is confirmed. This works in every mode, and it is the only automatic way a lead reaches a Won stage.
See How the bot works a pipeline.
Your pipelines
Every account starts with one pipeline, with the stages New lead, Contacted, Qualified, Booking, Won and Lost in your account's language. You can change its stages and add more pipelines: up to 5 pipelines, each with up to 15 stages, Won and Lost included.
| To do this | Read |
|---|---|
| Create, rename or delete a pipeline; templates | Lead pipelines |
| Add, rename, reorder or delete stages; tell the bot what to do in each one | Pipeline stages |
| Set the goal, who closes the sale and how the bot moves contacts | Pipeline settings |
| Decide which new contacts land on which pipeline | How leads enter a pipeline |
| Add leads from ads, comments and campaigns | Leads from ads, comments and campaigns |
| See how leads ended, and assign owners | Results and lead owners |
| Send a WhatsApp message to everyone on a stage | WhatsApp Campaigns and the Leads Pipeline |
To design a pipeline for your business: the method, second pipelines and building, stage instructions and exit conditions, common mistakes, and examples for appointments and real estate, sales closed by a person and shops and food orders.
Leads, human requests and bot control are different
A lead shows sales interest; a human request means the customer asked for a person; turning Chat AI off stops bot replies for that conversation. One contact can be both a lead and a human request. Moving, closing or declining a lead does not pause the bot and sends nothing to the customer. See Messages.
The automatic reminders configured under Configure are separate from the board.
Getting notified about a new lead
A new lead can send an email alert and an in-app notification, each with its own switch and its own trigger. See "Getting notified of a lead" in Leads and follow-ups.
If the board looks incomplete
- A contact is not on the board: only contacts with buying signals are added by themselves. See "If a lead did not appear" in How leads enter a pipeline.
- A declined card disappeared: declining removes it from the board without deleting the conversation.
- A column count is higher than the cards shown: the board displays up to 50 recent contacts per stage.
- A move did not stick: refresh once. If the card returns to its old stage, try again or change the stage from the contact in Messages.
- The page does not match this description: contact support.
Related pages
- Messages — read the conversation, reply and control Chat AI
- Configure — choose the bot's pause and reminder settings
- Customer memory — what the bot can save from a conversation