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Leads

Turn buying interest from conversations into a pipeline your team can manage​

Path: Leads

ReadyChatAI identifies contacts who show concrete buying interest while they talk to your bot. The Leads board puts those contacts in an incoming lane, then lets your team accept them and move them through an editable sales pipeline.

Leads does not replace Messages. The board is the sales view of a contact; the conversation remains in Messages, where you can read it and reply.

What becomes an incoming lead​

The bot looks for signs of commercial intent in the conversation, such as asking about a product or service, discussing a need, budget or preference, or moving toward a purchase or booking. A contact with enough evidence appears under Incoming.

Each card can show:

  • the contact name and channel;
  • High interest, Medium interest, or Went cold;
  • a short explanation of the opportunity;
  • when the customer last wrote;
  • an indicator when your team has saved notes.

These labels are guides, not guarantees. ReadyChatAI does not decide whether a deal is qualified, won or lost for you.

Accept or discard an incoming lead​

An incoming card has two actions:

  • Accept marks the contact as a sales lead and places it in the first open stage of your pipeline.
  • Decline removes it from Incoming. It does not delete the contact or its conversation.

You cannot drag a card directly out of Incoming. Accept it first, then move it between stages.

Declining is permanent for that conversation: it cannot come back to Incoming on its own, even if the customer later shows strong new interest. Its interest badge can still reappear elsewhere, such as on the conversation in Messages — only the Incoming lane stays closed to it. To work it again, open the conversation in Messages and set its pipeline stage yourself.

Work with the pipeline​

Accepted leads appear in your open stages. Drag a card from one open stage to another as the deal progresses. Won and Lost are terminal destinations that appear when you drag a card.

The initial pipeline is created automatically with three open stages plus Won and Lost, in your account's language (for example, Contacted, Qualified, Booking, Won, Lost in English). You can then:

  • add an open stage;
  • rename or recolor a stage;
  • move a stage left or right;
  • delete a stage;
  • move its contacts to another stage when it is not empty.

Any stage you add is always an open stage — there is currently no way to create a second Won-type or Lost-type column from the dashboard.

A pipeline can have up to 15 stages. Incoming is a system lane and does not count as one of those stages.

You can also change a contact's stage from its profile in Messages. Changes made in either place update the board for other open sessions.

Inspect a lead before following up​

Select a card to open its summary. Depending on what the customer has shared, it can contain the opportunity headline, relevant details collected during the conversation, and your team's private notes. Go to chat opens the full conversation in a new tab.

Some accepted leads show Suggest follow-up. This is a prompt for your team, not an automatic send: opening the suggestion does not contact the customer. Review the conversation and channel restrictions before sending anything.

The automated conversation reminders configured under Configure are separate from this board.

Filter by channel​

Use the channel filter above the board to focus on contacts from one connected channel. All channels restores the combined view.

With All channels selected, the number in each column is the full total, and the board displays up to the 50 most recently active contacts per stage at a time. Selecting a single channel filters those same loaded cards instead of asking the server again, so the count then reflects only the loaded cards that match — not the true total for that channel. On a busy stage spread across several channels, both the visible cards and the printed count can understate what you actually have. Switch back to All channels, or use Messages and its filters, to see everything.

Leads, human requests and bot control are different​

  • A lead means the conversation 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. Neither accepting a lead nor moving it between stages pauses the bot. A human request also does not pause it by itself: the configurable pause begins only after a member of your team sends a reply. See Messages.

When a lead's label stops updating​

Once anyone on your team replies in the conversation, or a human-takeover pause is set on it, ReadyChatAI stops updating that lead's interest label, score, headline and summary — even if the bot keeps answering the same customer for weeks afterward. The card stays wherever you left it, but its intelligence is frozen at that moment; only your own manual moves change it from then on.

Interest labels also follow a fixed timeline when the customer goes quiet. Any interest label disappears entirely after about 7 days of silence, and a card still sitting in Incoming drops off the board with it — the conversation itself is not deleted and stays in Messages. A lead that reached High interest also switches to Went cold after about 24 hours of silence, well before that 7-day cutoff.

Getting notified about a new lead​

A new lead can trigger two separate notifications. Every time the bot registers buying interest — not only High interest — your business email gets an alert, at most once every 24 hours per customer, and only if that email is added, verified, and the sales-leads notification is turned on. The in-app bell is stricter: it fires only once per conversation, the first time its interest reaches High, and will not fire again for that conversation even after a later email alert goes out.

If the board looks incomplete​

  • No card under Incoming: only contacts with current buying signals appear there; ordinary conversations remain in Messages.
  • A declined card disappeared: declining intentionally removes it from Incoming 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 open the contact in Messages.
  • 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