Job · Lead qualification
Sort buyers from browsers before a person replies.
An ad click or a DM lands in the inbox. Scout asks the questions your sales team always asks, writes the answers onto the contact as fields, scores the lead against rules you wrote, and routes the thread with the reason attached.
Illustrative demo with fictional data.
What it looks like
An ad click, two questions, a routed lead.
The qualification happens inside the window the customer opened, so the exchange costs nothing beyond the service-message allowance.
The click arrives with its source
A click-to-WhatsApp ad opens the conversation and the campaign comes attached, so the lead's origin is known before anyone replies.
Scout asks your questions
The ones your team agreed on, in the order they agreed on, written down in a scenario anybody can read and change.
The answers become fields
Quantity, city, timeline. Structured on the contact, not buried in the thread — so they are filterable, exportable and usable by a routing rule.
The lead is scored and the guardrail holds
Scored against rules you wrote. No price is quoted that is not a catalogue match; Scout says a person will confirm, because that is true.
It is routed with a reason
Assigned to a person or a team, inside the 24-hour window, with the captured fields and the reason for the routing visible in the thread.
The problem
Click-to-WhatsApp sends everyone to the same inbox.
Serious buyers, price checkers and people who tapped by accident all arrive looking identical.
- Leads arrive unsorted
- A campaign that works produces a queue, and the queue is handled in arrival order rather than value order.
- The first questions are always the same
- Quantity, city, timeline, budget. A person retypes them dozens of times a day, and the answers end up in a thread nobody can filter.
- Response time decides the deal
- A lead that waits an hour for a first message has usually already asked someone else.
- Sales context dies in chat
- The answers live in a conversation rather than on the contact, so nobody can build a list of last month's bulk enquiries.
How it works
The mechanism, step by step.
Qualification is a scenario plus structured capture plus a routing rule. None of those three should be a black box.
- Source capture
- Click-to-WhatsApp ads, Instagram DMs, Messenger, web chat and forms arrive with their referrer intact and attached to the conversation.
- The scenario
- Questions, order, and what to do with each answer, written down and reviewable. Changing your qualification criteria is editing a scenario, not retraining a model.
- Structured capture
- Answers land on contact fields you define, so a sales list is a filter rather than an afternoon of reading transcripts.
- Scoring
- Thresholds on the captured fields, the source and the contact history. Rules you can read, not a score you have to trust.
- Routing
- To a team, a named person, a round robin or a queue with an SLA. The reason for the routing travels with the assignment.
- Handoff
- The assigned person opens the full thread with the captured fields beside it and can take over mid-sentence.
What it costs to send
Qualify inside the window the lead opened.
A lead writes to you first, which opens a 24-hour service window. Qualification therefore runs on service messages, not templates. The expensive part is the follow-up a day later.
- Qualifying the lead
- Service message
- A message from the customer opens a 24-hour window. Meta began charging for service messages on 1 October 2026, with the first 1,000 per business phone number per month free.
- Sales follow-up after 24 hours (Egypt)
- $0.0644
- Once the window closes, a sales follow-up is a marketing template — about eighteen times the utility rate.
- A transactional update instead (Egypt)
- $0.0036
- Utility rate, when the message is genuinely about an order or appointment the customer already made.
Source: Meta WhatsApp per-message rate card, Egypt, retrieved 2 November 2026; category, window and service-message rules from Meta developer documentation.
Meta bills these fees, not us, and we never mark them up. BlendDesk charges for seats and AI resolutions.
Control
It qualifies. It does not negotiate.
The fastest way to lose a lead and the trust at the same time is an agent that improvises commercial terms.
- No price invented
- A guardrail blocks any quote that is not a catalogue match. Scout says a person will confirm, and then a person does.
- No commitments
- Discounts, delivery dates and contract terms are human decisions, gated by approval before anything is sent.
- It says what it is
- Scout introduces itself as an assistant and tells the customer a person is coming. It never pretends to be a salesperson.
- Every run is readable
- Which scenario ran, which questions were asked, which fields were written, which rule routed it — one trace, after the fact.
Source: WhatsApp Business Messaging Policy, updated 23 September 2026.
What you need
Agreement on the questions is the hard part, and it is not a software problem.
- A connected channel, plus the ad account if you run click-to-WhatsApp.
- Three or four qualifying questions your sales team agrees on.
- Contact fields to hold the answers.
- A routing rule: who gets what, and how fast.
Questions buyers actually ask.
Does Scout pretend to be a salesperson?
No. It introduces itself as an assistant, asks the agreed questions, and says a person is coming. Pretending is how you lose the lead and the trust at the same time.
What happens when a lead asks for a price?
It gets the catalogue price when there is a catalogue match, and a person when there is not. That guardrail is not optional and it is visible in the trace.
Can it book a meeting?
Yes, if you connect a calendar as a tool. Booking is a state change, so you decide whether it needs an approval first.
How fast does it reply?
As fast as the channel delivers the message. We do not publish a response-time figure, because the only number that matters is yours and you will see it in analytics.
Can I change the questions without a developer?
Yes. The questions live in a scenario, you edit it, and you rehearse the change in the playground against past conversations before it goes live.
Qualify your next campaign's leads.
Book a demo, bring your qualifying questions, and we will have them running against a test number before the call ends.