A step-by-step guide to capturing every website and email enquiry as a lead automatically, so nothing sits unread in an inbox.
Enquiries arrive in different places — a website form, a text from someone who found you on Google, an email from a receptionist — and each one is a manual handoff to wherever you'll actually act on it. A lead that lands while you're up a ladder or mid-job is the easiest kind to lose: by the time you're back at your desk to write it into a spreadsheet or diary, a competitor has already called them back. Automatic capture means every enquiry, wherever it comes from, ends up somewhere you'll actually see it — without you being the one who retypes it.
Most trades businesses aren't losing enquiries because customers stop wanting the work — they're losing them to slow, inconsistent follow-up. A form submission sits in an inbox nobody checks until evening. A voicemail gets transcribed onto a scrap of paper that goes missing. A receptionist emails a lead through, but it's never added anywhere, so it only gets actioned if someone happens to reread that email. None of these are capacity problems — they're handoff problems, and every manual handoff is a place a lead can quietly drop out.
Three different channels, three different formats, and — for most businesses — no single place they all land. That's the actual problem to solve, not any one channel individually.
The fix is the same regardless of which tools you use, and it comes down to four steps:
Whatever captures the enquiry, aim for the same handful of basics every time:
That's enough to call them back or start a job without asking the same questions twice or retyping anything from the original message. It's also exactly what a decent automatic system should be pulling out on its own — which is the part that actually saves the retyping, not just the routing.
TradeFlow365's Lead Capture gives every company a dedicated lead email address under Settings. Add it as a recipient on your website's contact form, and ask your receptionist to CC it, and every enquiry gets read by AI the moment it arrives — pulling out the name, contact details, address, and what they need doing, exactly as above. Genuine enquiries are added straight to your Leads board with all of that already filled in — nobody has to open the email and copy anything across.
Anything the AI isn't confident about lands in a Needs review queue instead of being added wrong or dropped — you can add it as a lead yourself, correcting anything it got wrong, or dismiss it. Nothing from a genuine customer enquiry disappears without someone seeing it first.
Want to see the full picture of how leads move from a first enquiry to a completed job? See TradeFlow365's job management software for trade businesses, or browse more Lead Capture advice.