I work in the oilfield trades and kept seeing contractors lose jobs to whoever called back first. So I built this:
- A form captures the lead
- Claude Haiku tags urgency (Emergency / High / Normal) and writes a summary and next step
- It logs to Google Sheets
- The customer gets an instant reply that mentions their actual problem
- The owner gets an alert with a tap-to-call button for anything urgent
A few things I learned:
Never trust the AI output blindly. I parse Claude’s JSON in a Code node with a fallback, so if the API fails, the lead still gets logged as “Needs Review” instead of disappearing.
Put rules on what the AI can promise customers. My first version told a customer “we’ll get someone out right away.” That’s a problem for a one-man shop that’s already on a job, so the prompt now bans timeline promises.
Haiku is plenty for triage and costs a fraction of a cent per lead.
Happy to answer questions about the setup. I also packaged it as a template with a setup guide if anyone wants to skip the build: Lead Catcher for Contractors: AI Lead Triage + Auto-Reply (n8n Template)