Does your chatbot actually tell you when a lead comes in?
A chatbot can do everything right — answer the question, capture the name and number, log the lead in the dashboard — and the business still loses the job, because nobody checks the dashboard between calls. If the only way to find out about a new lead is to remember to log in and look, most owners won't catch it in time. The chatbot's job isn't finished when it captures a lead. It's finished when you know about it.
Three ways to hear about it, and you don't have to pick just one
Under Settings → Notifications, a new lead can reach you three ways at once:
- Email — a copy of the visitor's contact info and the full chat transcript, sent to whatever address you set.
- Text message (SMS) — a short alert with the lead's name, phone number, and a snippet of what they asked, with a link straight to the lead in your dashboard. This needs a connected text service (SiteMind uses Twilio) — set that up once under the Text Messaging card, and the alert starts working immediately.
- Webhook — a raw copy of the lead sent to a URL you control, for teams that pipe leads into their own tools instead of (or alongside) email and text.
You can turn on all three. A plumbing company running on a phone in a truck might want the text; the office manager checking email between calls gets the transcript; a team already piping data into Slack or a spreadsheet wires the webhook. None of them require the others.
"Sent" only counts if it actually sent
A notification that silently fails is worse than no notification at all — it tells you the system has it handled when nobody's actually been told. SiteMind doesn't just fire a text and assume it landed: the send is a real, timed attempt, and the result — delivered or failed — is what actually gets recorded against that lead. If your text service isn't connected yet, or an address bounces, the lead doesn't quietly disappear into a channel that never worked; it shows up queued or failed instead of a false "done."
That status isn't buried in a log file. The Settings page has a delivery panel that answers "did my leads actually go out?" in plain language, right under the destinations you set up — and if one failed, there's a Send again button right there, instead of you having to notice a customer never got a callback.
What happens when more than one channel is set up
If you've connected a webhook, a text number, and an email, SiteMind doesn't fire all three and hope one sticks — it has a clear order. A connected webhook is treated as the primary channel; text is the real-time channel when a webhook isn't the main path; email is the fallback everyone has by default. Whichever one is actually doing the delivering is the one whose success or failure shows up as the lead's status, so "delivered" always means something actually happened, not just that a message was attempted somewhere.
Setting it up
Email and webhook notifications don't need anything beyond entering the address or URL under Settings → Notifications — they save the moment you click away from the field. Text alerts need one extra step: connect a Twilio account under the Text messaging (SMS) card first, then the number you entered in Notifications starts receiving real texts instead of sitting there unused. There's a Send test SMS button on that card so you can confirm it works before a real lead depends on it.
The bottom line
A captured lead that nobody hears about in time is the same, from a customer's perspective, as a phone call that goes to voicemail forever. SiteMind pushes new leads out to you the moment they happen — by text, email, or webhook, in whatever combination fits how you actually work — and tells you the truth when a message doesn't make it, instead of a dashboard that quietly assumes everything's fine.