How to Capture Leads After Hours With an AI Chat
A lot of interest in your business arrives when nobody is there to answer. A visitor reads your services page at nine in the evening, has one question, finds no answer and leaves. An AI chat can answer that question from your own pages, ask for contact details at the right moment and leave you a lead in the morning with the whole conversation attached. This guide shows how to set it up so that leads are collected with consent and your team does not have to guess what each visitor wanted.
Step 1: List what after-hours visitors want to know
Look at the messages that arrive overnight and at weekends: contact form submissions, voicemails, emails on Monday morning. Group them by what the visitor wanted: price or scope, availability, how it works, where you are. Write each question in the visitor's words. These are the questions the chat must answer on its own, because a visitor who gets a real answer stays in the conversation, and one who does not usually leaves. Note also the questions that always need a person, such as a custom quote.
Step 2: Let the chat answer first
Add your website, and documents if your answers live in files, as sources. The chat answers in plain words, only from what you gave it, and shows a numbered source next to each sentence. When your content has no answer, it says so instead of guessing and offers the next step you chose. Test it with the questions from step 1 in the test chat and fix any weak answer by improving the page or writing a saved answer, which is live the moment you save it. Add the chat to your site with one script tag, and check that OneType shows "Live on" followed by your site's address.
Step 3: Collect details with the contact form
A visitor becomes a lead through the short contact form in the chat, which also appears when the chat cannot answer. Details a visitor types while chatting can be saved too, depending on the agent's settings. The form needs an email, and a name and phone number are optional. Details a visitor types in the chat can still be saved to Contacts without an email, depending on the agent's settings. The agent keeps only what the visitor typed about themselves, never a colleague's or a friend's number, and it only fills empty fields. It never records marketing consent on its own: a marketing opt-in is optional, and when it is given it is stored with the time it was given.
Step 4: Get alerted when a lead arrives
Decide how your team hears about new leads. A new lead shows in the dashboard bell and can be emailed to your team, and on plans with integrations it also reaches Slack or Discord once you connect them. An alert shows the name (if given) and which fields were left, never the email or phone number, so open the conversation in OneType to see them. If the same person submits more than one form in a day, you get one alert. If a visitor is still chatting when you are back, anyone on your team can take over and reply in person. If you want leads in your own system, signed webhooks send each new lead there on plans that include webhooks, and you can export contacts as a CSV file.
Step 5: Follow up with the conversation in front of you
Open Contacts in the morning and filter to leads. Each lead shows the conversation it came from and the last thing the visitor asked, so your first message can answer their question instead of asking it again. With handoff turned on, which needs a paid plan, a visitor can reach your team during the hours you set, and outside them, or when nobody is online, the visitor gets the contact form. After a week, look at the questions the chat could not answer, grouped by meaning with the most asked first, and add the missing answers once. Your after-hours chat will answer them the next night.
Turn overnight questions into leads
See how it works: contacts and leads in OneType, see AI chat for lead generation, or start free.