Set lead capture fields

What it is

Lead capture is a short form your chatbot shows a visitor before it gives its first reply. Whatever they enter becomes a customer record, and their conversation is attached to it.

It is off until you turn it on. A brand-new chatbot chats happily with anonymous visitors and produces no contacts at all, which is exactly why most empty Customers lists are empty.

Settings are per chatbot. Your sales chatbot can demand a name and a work email while your support chatbot asks for nothing, and neither affects the other.

When you would use it

Turn it on when a conversation is worth following up: a pricing enquiry, a demo request, a quote. Leave it off — or make everything optional — when the chatbot's job is to answer quickly and a form would just make people leave.

The trade-off is real and you should make it deliberately. A required form converts fewer conversations but every one it does produce is contactable. An optional form barely dents your chat volume and captures far less.

Where to find it

Open Dashboard → Chatbots → your chatbot → Settings, then the Customer data section. Its description reads "Collect visitor details before the first reply."

The same options appear as the Customer Data step when you create a chatbot with the wizard: "Optionally ask visitors for contact details before the bot replies."

Steps

1. Open Dashboard → Chatbots → your chatbot → Settings → Customer data.
2. Turn on the main switch. The label is a question: "Ask visitors for contact details before the bot replies?" The hint underneath explains where the results land: "When on, the chatbot collects the fields you choose before answering. Captured contacts appear under Customers."
3. Add the fields you want. Keep the list short — every field costs you conversions.
4. Mark fields required or optional individually. Read the section on skipping below before you require anything.
5. Decide whether to allow skipping.
6. Edit the privacy notice so it says something true about what you do with the details. It follows the chatbot's language.
7. If you want a marketing opt-in, enable it. It must be a genuine choice the visitor ticks, never a pre-ticked box.
8. Save.
9. Test it on a real visitor surface — the hosted page or your live website — not only in test chat. Open it in a private window so you arrive as a stranger.
10. Confirm the record appears on Dashboard → Customers.

Which fields you can ask for

Seven fields map directly onto the customer profile and are the ones to prefer, because they become filterable, searchable, sortable columns:

Full name · Email · Phone · Company · Job title · Website · Country

You can also add fields of your own. Those are stored on the record and shown on the profile, but they are not first-class columns — you cannot filter the list by them. Use them for genuinely bespoke questions like a project budget band or a preferred contact time, not as a substitute for the seven above.

Each field has a type, which controls both the input the visitor sees and the checking Agentency does:

Text · Email · Phone · Long text · Number · Dropdown · Checkbox · Date · Website address

Choosing the right type matters. An email field rejects a malformed address at the point of entry; a plain text field labelled "Email" accepts anything and you find out later that half your list is uncontactable.

Required fields and skipping

The two settings interact in one way that surprises people, so here it is plainly:

• With skipping off, a required field genuinely blocks the conversation. The visitor cannot get an answer until they fill it in. This is enforced on Agentency's side, not just in the visitor's browser, so a clever visitor cannot bypass the form.
• With skipping on, every field becomes optional. The interface says so directly: "With skip on, visitors see a separate Skip button and can always continue, so fields can't be required — every field you collect becomes optional."

There is no middle setting where a field is required and skippable. Pick which matters more: getting the contact, or getting the conversation.

What the visitor sees

A short panel before the chat starts, headed "Before we continue, please share your details", with your fields, your privacy notice, and a Continue button. Skip for now appears alongside it if you allowed skipping.

Once submitted, they chat normally and are not asked again in that session.

Consent and privacy

Every submission records that the visitor accepted your privacy notice, along with when. If you offer a marketing opt-in, that is recorded as a separate consent and only when they actually tick it — an untouched checkbox produces nothing. Both appear in the Consent & privacy block on the profile.

Agentency does not store the visitor's raw network address or browser string against the consent; it keeps only a one-way fingerprint, enough to show a record exists without holding the identifier itself.

Write a privacy notice that is actually true and link it to your policy. If you have legal pages published through Agentency, link them.

Limits and plan notes

Lead capture is part of the product, with no separate charge and no per-contact fee.

One form per chatbot. You cannot show different fields on different pages of your website with the same chatbot.

The form runs before the first reply. There is no setting to show it after a few messages instead. If you want details collected mid-conversation, that is a Call action's job — see Collect visitor details.

Submissions are rate-limited per visitor, and there is a cap on how many fields one submission may contain. Neither will affect a sensible form; both exist to stop the endpoint being abused.

A hidden anti-spam field is included automatically. You do not configure it and your visitors never see it.

Common problems

Visitors never see the form.

Three things to check, in order: the main switch is on; you added at least one field; you saved. Then test on the hosted page or your live site in a private window — the owner's test chat is not a reliable preview of the visitor experience.

I turned it on and my chat volume dropped.

That is a required form working as designed. Either allow skipping, or cut the form back to a single email field. Very few visitors will fill in six boxes to ask one question.

Conversations are being blocked and I did not intend that.

You have required fields with skipping off. Turn skipping on, or clear the required flags.

Emails are arriving misspelled.

The field is probably typed as plain text. Change its type to Email so malformed addresses are rejected at entry.

I added a field and old records are still empty.

Fields only fill on new submissions. Nothing is applied retrospectively.

Phone numbers are not matching returning visitors.

Numbers only recognise a returning person reliably when they include the country code. Label the field clearly, or add a country field so visitors know what you expect.