Multi Channel Intake Form Router
Automatically capture enquiries from your website, Facebook, Instagram, Google, and email into one place. Every lead gets an instant reply, a CRM record, and a route to the right person on your team.
Five Inboxes, Zero System
Your business is present on five, six, maybe seven channels. Website contact form. Facebook Messenger. Instagram DMs. Google Business messages. Email. Maybe WhatsApp. Each one has its own inbox, its own notification sound, and its own person who's supposed to be watching it.
Nobody watches all of them. 79% of leads that arrive through social media never get a response. Not because the team doesn't care, but because the message sat in an inbox that nobody opened until Thursday afternoon.
And speed matters more than most businesses realise. Leads contacted within the first hour convert at two to three times the rate of those left waiting. Yet most businesses take 12 to 24 hours to reply. By then, the prospect has already called your competitor, booked with them, and forgotten your name.
62% of companies say landing new clients is their biggest operational headache. But the problem isn't that leads don't exist. They're already reaching out. The problem is that enquiries are scattered across channels with no unified system to catch them, log them, or make sure someone actually responds.
How It Works
This automation connects every inbound channel into a single routing system. When a message arrives on any channel, it gets normalised, classified, logged, and sent to the right person. Here's the sequence.
1. Capture the message from any channel
Triggers fire on each channel you use: your website form (such as Typeform, Jotform, or Gravity Forms), Facebook Messenger, Instagram DMs, Google Business messages, and email. Each trigger feeds into the same workflow, so it doesn't matter where the enquiry originates.
2. Normalise into a standard format
Every message gets restructured into the same shape: contact name, phone or email, message content, and source channel. A Facebook DM and a website form submission look identical by the time they hit the next step. This removes the chaos of dealing with five different message formats.
3. Deduplicate the contact
The system checks your CRM (such as HubSpot or Pipedrive) for an existing record matching the phone number, email, or name. If the same person messaged on Instagram last week and just submitted a website form, their records merge instead of creating a duplicate. The source channel gets tagged so you can see every touchpoint.
4. Classify the enquiry
AI reads the message and classifies it by intent: new enquiry, support request, billing question, complaint, or spam. This goes beyond simple keyword matching. The system understands that "I'd like a quote for my bathroom renovation" is a sales lead for the estimator, while "Where can I find your pricing?" is an informational request that just needs a link to your pricing page.
5. Send a channel appropriate auto reply
The lead gets an instant acknowledgement on the same channel they used. A Facebook message gets a Messenger reply. A form submission gets an email. The reply confirms their message was received and sets expectations for response time. This alone puts you ahead of most competitors.
6. Route to the right team member
Based on the AI classification (and optionally territory or specialty rules), the enquiry lands in the correct Slack channel or gets assigned to the right person. Sales leads go to sales. Support tickets go to support. Spam gets filtered out entirely.
7. Log for tracking and attribution
Every enquiry is recorded with its source channel, timestamp, classification, and response time. This gives you a clear picture of which channels actually generate leads and how quickly your team responds to each one.
The Channel You Forgot About
Ask each person on your team when they last checked Google Business messages. Most won't remember. Some won't even know that channel exists.
Now open it up and scroll. There are messages in there. Enquiries from people who found you on Google Maps, tapped "Message", typed out what they needed, and heard nothing back. Those people hired someone else.
A plumbing company we audited had 23 unanswered Google Business messages over a three month period. Eleven of them mentioned specific jobs. At an average job value of $800, that's $8,800 in work that walked out the door because nobody knew the messages were there.
This isn't a Google problem. It's a fragmentation problem. The more channels you're active on, the more gaps appear. Instagram DMs get checked by whoever runs the social account (and only when they're posting). Facebook Messenger gets glanced at once a day, maybe. Your website form is probably the only channel with a reliable process, and even that depends on someone reading the notification email promptly.
Automation doesn't replace your team. It makes sure every message, on every channel, gets logged and routed within seconds. Your team still does the selling. They just stop missing the opportunities.
Why Keyword Matching Falls Short
Some businesses try to solve routing with basic keyword rules. If the message contains "quote", send it to sales. If it contains "invoice", send it to billing. Simple enough.
Until someone writes "I saw your quote on your website and I have a question about the inclusions." That's a sales conversation, but a keyword rule matching "question" might route it to support. Or consider "My invoice says I owe for a service I never received." That's a complaint, not a billing enquiry, but the keyword "invoice" sends it to the billing team who can't resolve it.
AI classification handles context. It reads the full message, understands intent, and routes accurately 85 to 90% of the time for standard business enquiry types. It also handles messages in languages other than English and non standard phrasing that keyword rules miss entirely. The cost sits around one to five cents per message. For the accuracy gain, that's trivial.
The Business Impact
Take a trades business with three staff members and an average job value of $1,200. They're active on five channels but only consistently monitoring two (email and phone). That means 60% of their inbound channels are unmonitored or poorly monitored.
If they receive 40 enquiries per month across all channels, and 79% of social media leads go unanswered, that's roughly 15 lost leads per month from social channels alone. Even converting a third of those (a conservative estimate given the speed advantage of auto replies) adds five new jobs per month. At $1,200 each, that's $6,000 in monthly revenue. $72,000 per year.
The automation costs $50 to $100 per month for the platform fees (Zapier or Make triggers across multiple channels), plus a one time setup. Payback period: the first week.
Businesses that implement unified routing report a 30 to 50% increase in lead capture. And response times drop from 12 to 24 hours down to under one hour. Both of those numbers translate directly into conversion rate improvements.
- Every enquiry from every channel captured and logged automatically
- Response time reduced from hours (or days) to seconds
- Duplicate contacts merged so you see the full history across channels
- Source attribution tracking shows which channels actually generate revenue
- Team members receive only the enquiries relevant to their role
- Spam and irrelevant messages filtered before they reach your team
Frequently Asked Questions
Do we really need this if most of our leads come from our website?
You might be surprised how many leads you're missing on other channels. The point isn't that your website form is broken. It's that people are reaching out on Instagram, Facebook, and Google Business messages and getting no reply. Those aren't low quality leads. They're people who found you and chose to reach out. You just didn't hear them.
Will this work with our existing CRM?
Yes. The automation integrates with HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Zoho, and most other CRMs through Zapier or Make. If your CRM has an API (and almost all of them do), it can receive the normalised contact data and source tagging. Nothing changes about how your team uses the CRM day to day.
What about Instagram's restrictions on automated messaging?
Meta's policies allow automated replies to messages that the user initiated. You can't send unsolicited DMs, but you can absolutely auto reply when someone messages your business account. The automation stays within those rules by only responding to inbound messages, never initiating outreach.
How accurate is the AI classification?
For standard business enquiry types (sales, support, billing, spam), AI classification achieves 85 to 90% accuracy. The remaining 10 to 15% are edge cases that get routed to a general queue for manual triage. Over time, the classification improves as you flag corrections. Even at 85%, that's far better than the current system of hoping the right person checks the right inbox.
What happens when the same person contacts us on multiple channels?
The deduplication step checks for matching phone numbers, email addresses, and names in your CRM. When a match is found, the new message gets attached to the existing contact record instead of creating a duplicate. Your team sees the full conversation history across channels in one place. Deduplication isn't perfect (someone might use a different email on each channel), but it catches the majority of duplicates.
Can we customise the routing rules beyond AI classification?
Absolutely. You can layer in territory rules (route by postcode), specialty rules (route bathroom renovations to your bathroom team), priority scoring (high value jobs go to senior staff), or time based rules (after hours enquiries go to an on call person). The AI classification is the first filter. Your business rules sit on top of it.
How long does this take to set up?
A basic version covering three to four channels with CRM integration and auto replies takes one to two weeks. Adding AI classification, deduplication, and custom routing rules adds another week. Most businesses are fully operational within three weeks. Book your free audit and we'll map out which channels you're losing leads on and what the setup looks like for your specific situation.
Sources
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