Send new inquiries to the right place with a summary

Fast, and in the right hands

An inquiry that sits in the wrong inbox for two days can go cold, which makes routing worth automating. The AI’s job is small and checkable: read the message, pull out the facts, write a summary. Rules and people do the deciding.

Here’s the shape. Someone submits your web form (the trigger). Fields the form already has, like name and email, go straight into your CRM, the system where you keep customers and deals. An AI step reads only the free-text message and pulls out the facts. Your rules decide who gets it, and that person gets a two-line summary with a link to the record.

Keep the original message attached to the record, so anyone can check the summary against what the customer wrote. And send the AI step only the message: it doesn’t need a phone number or an address to summarize a request.

Pull out facts, don’t invent them

Give the AI step a fixed list of fields: service (from your own list), what they need in their own words, location, timing and budget. The key instruction: if a field isn’t stated, write “not stated.” Otherwise it may helpfully estimate a budget from the job type, and an estimate looks like a fact once it’s in your CRM.

Let rules route, not the AI. The AI picks the service from your list, or UNSURE; a filter or branch step then sends a plumbing firm’s installs to one person, repairs to another and UNSURE to the office. Rules you can read are rules you can test. Priority works the same way: an AI asked which leads look promising may reward polished writing over real fit, so write any priority rules yourself.

Watch for two traps: returning customers and spam. Have the automation look up the email address first and update an existing record instead of creating a duplicate, and send likely spam to a review list rather than deleting it, since a real customer’s clumsy message can look like spam.

The three questions, for inquiries

Inquiries are time-sensitive, so the answers lean on reminders, not on AI-written replies.

• Who approves: whoever owns new inquiries confirms who takes each one and writes the first reply. The only automatic reply is a fixed acknowledgment a person approved once, promising only what you can keep.
• If nobody does: an inquiry still unassigned after, say, two business hours sends a reminder to the owner, then to a backup. Silence escalates; it never triggers an AI-written reply.
• How you’ll know it broke: once a week, compare form submissions with new or updated CRM records. If the counts differ, find the missing ones in the run history. After any change to the form, send a test inquiry through.