Our lead capture ran through the form. Chat was a support service, there to answer questions, never wired to create leads. Yet over 13 months around 64,000 conversations passed through it, and about a third of visitors typed in their email. About 25 a month became CRM leads, logged by hand when an agent judged a conversation worth it. That low number was by design, not neglect. What nobody had done was analyse the transcripts at scale to see what the channel was quietly holding: a stream of high-intent contacts the business had never counted.
The obvious headline was also misleading, and saying so mattered. Manually captured chat leads converted exceptionally well, but they were high-intent by construction, so extrapolating their rates would have overstated the prize. I cross-referenced chat emails against existing CRM records, found around 40% were already known via brochure downloads, and modelled only the genuinely incremental remainder at conservative, mid and optimistic conversion rates: roughly 200 to 1,000 incremental registrations a year. The business case led with the honest number, and it still cleared easily. The integration pays for itself with fewer than two additional registrations a year.
The fix was deliberately boring: a lightweight automation bridge from the chat platform into Dynamics 365, plus an engagement strategy for email-only leads the outbound call model could not reach. The first automated journey now performs at parity with the manual process it replaced, and a channel nobody used to count is finally feeding the pipeline.