Delivering the night leads in the morning
4 min read
A night-time lead is stuck between two bad options: it lands in a chat nobody reads, or it is not collected at all. There is a third one.
What happens to a night-time lead
A lead that arrives at 23:00 lands in the group. The operator is asleep. In the morning they open the group and find fifteen overnight messages mixed into yesterday's conversation — which ones have been answered and which have not is impossible to tell.
Switching the integration off for the evening is no solution either: then the leads that come in overnight are not collected at all, and the ads you paid for run for nothing.
The daily schedule closes exactly that gap. Leads keep being collected but do not land in the chat — they wait until the hour you named.
Three times, one schedule
The schedule is made of three times and each one does a different job:
- “Daily pause time” — at this hour the integration pauses itself. New leads are stored in the database but are not sent to the destination.
- “Daily start time” — at this hour the integration switches itself back on and new leads go out in real time again.
- “Send leads time” — at this hour the leads gathered during the pause are sent to the destination. It works even while the integration is still paused.
A typical setup looks like this: pause at 19:00, start at 09:00, send what has gathered at 09:00. The operator starts the day in front of an ordered list of the overnight leads, and through the day everything arrives in real time as usual.
Paused is not the same as lost
The key difference: a paused integration does not reject the lead, it delays it. The lead is accepted, stored and queued.
That is why “Send leads time” works even while the integration is still paused. So you can take the batch at 08:00 and start work at 09:00 — the two hours do not have to match.
Combinations the schedule will not accept
The three times depend on each other, so some combinations will not save:
- If a pause time is set, a start time and a send time have to be set as well
- The pause time and the start time must not be the same
- The start time must not come after the send time
These limits are not arbitrary. A setup with a pause time and no start time would leave the integration paused forever — and nobody would notice, while the leads piled up in the queue.
Manual control is there too
Setting up a schedule is not compulsory — all of it can be done by hand. Next to each integration there are “Pause” and “Start” buttons, and a separate “Send” button for what has gathered during the pause.
“Start” does not send the gathered leads by itself — that is deliberate. When you switch the integration back on, a hundred old leads do not suddenly spill into the chat; you take them through “Send” at a moment that suits you.
If you work with several integrations, the bulk actions above the list pause them, start them or send what has gathered for all of them at once. And “Reset auto-mode” clears the schedule settings from every integration.
How it fits the peak hours
Before you set up a schedule, find out what hour your leads arrive. In our cut the three busiest hours are 20:00, 21:00 and 22:00 — that is, after the working day ends in most teams.
If you set the pause at 18:00 you are putting the three biggest hours of the day into the batch. That is not a mistake in itself — but it should be a deliberate decision, not an accident. For some products an ordered morning list works better than a hurried evening reply.