Calls, leads and contacts

Three pages hold the people your agents talk to. They overlap, and the overlap confuses new teams, so here is the distinction in one line each:

• A call is a conversation that happened.
• A lead is a person a Receptionist decided you should follow up.
• A contact is a person in your address book, whether or not they have been called yet.

Calls

Every call an agent takes or makes lands on the Calls page: when, who, which agent, how long, how it went, and what it was about. Open a call to read the transcript, listen to the recording, and see everything the agent captured — each value with a note on why the agent recorded it that way. Conversation has the call line by line, with when each was said:

After the call lists what HiloVoice did once the call ended, and whether it worked: here, the new patient added to Leads and sent a text.

Calls are the audit trail. Nothing on the other pages exists without a call behind it, and when a lead or a campaign recipient looks wrong, the call is where you find out what was actually said.

Test calls from Try it are kept here too, out of the way: tick Show test calls to see them.

Leads

A lead appears when a Receptionist's call ends and the caller is a kind you ticked under Who becomes a lead, on the agent's Lead Capture step. A new Receptionist makes a lead of every new client out of the box. A caller turned away by a rule on Caller Screening still becomes a lead, marked Disqualified.

A lead is Open until someone on your team, or a later call, decides otherwise:

Open a lead to see the calls behind it, what was captured, and to set its status. History has every call and everything your team did, newest first: a returning caller adds a line each time they ring. Under Actions, Mark as a current customer marks a lead who has become one, and the list shows them as Customer. Leads can be archived; an archived lead keeps its calls and can be restored.

When Lead scoring is on for the agent, each lead also has a score from 0 to 100, worked out from what the call showed, and a Score tab that says why.

One person, one lead. Combine leads across agents is on for every organization to begin with, so a caller who rings several of your Receptionists is one lead however they reach you. Switch it off under Settings → Organization to have each agent keep its own leads.

Leads can be sent onwards the moment they are created — to HubSpot, to a Slack channel, through Zapier, or to your own system through the Lead endpoint integration.

Contacts

The Contacts page is your address book. Everyone you import to a campaign appears here, and you can add a person by hand. A contact is where a phone number, an email, a reference and a name live together, and it is what a Lookup on your contacts finds when someone rings: the Receptionist can greet a known customer by name because they are a contact.

Contacts are the raw material for campaigns; leads are the output of calls. A person can be both.

Three lists that decide who gets through

Under Settings are three short lists that act before the agent says a word:

Related

• The five kinds of agent — which kinds create leads
• Campaigns and recipients — what a recipient is, and how it differs from a contact
• Review your calls — finding a call, its transcript and recording
• Follow up your leads — working your leads
• Keep your contacts up to date — your address book