Case study · Leads · Reliability · Alerts

Nothing breaks
in silence.

A form sends a lead to up to five places: the spreadsheet, the inbox, the team chat, the email tool and the booking system. If one of them failed, nobody found out until a customer asked why no one had called back.

Problem

If saving or sending a lead failed, nobody found out until a customer complained.

Solution

The spreadsheet save, the emails and the booking system now report their own failures to the team chat the same day.

Up to 5: places every lead is sent
1: team chat for every alert
Same day: instead of when a customer complains

Context

Every website enquiry goes to several places at once: the team's spreadsheet, the shared inbox, the team chat, the email tool and the booking system. Each one is a separate connection that can fail on its own.

The problem

Some of those connections failed without a trace. The spreadsheet step had no check at all: if it stopped working, rows simply stopped appearing, and nobody would know.

What I found

The spreadsheet connection had no error check, unlike the email and booking steps right next to it.
When the team chat was upgraded automatically, it got a new address, and alerts kept going to the old one.
Each failure on its own was small. Together they meant leads could disappear quietly.

What I did

The steps that used to fail silently now check themselves: if a lead isn't saved to the sheet, or an email or booking step fails, the team gets an alert in the chat straight away.
Alerts point to the right place: the new chat address is in use, with a safe fallback if it changes again.
Nothing blocks the customer: if one step fails, the enquiry still goes through everywhere else.

Why not just check the spreadsheet every morning?

Because nobody does, and you only notice on the day it matters. The system should tell you, not the other way round.

Outcome

If saving a lead, sending an email or a booking step fails, the team hears about it the same day, not a month later.

What I'd do differently

Build the alert at the same time as the connection. A step that can fail silently is only half finished.

“A failure you hear about today is a lead you can still save.”