When Website Enquiries Stop Reaching Your CRM: A Recovery Playbook

A prospect submits your contact form and sees a confirmation. Your CRM shows nothing. The immediate job is to establish what the website accepted, where the handover stopped and which enquiries still need a reply.

Trace one enquiry through the handover

Start with a clearly marked test enquiry on the public form. Record the submission time, the page, the confirmation shown and any reference assigned by the website. Compare that evidence with the form’s receiving system and the CRM. Use identifiers and timestamps in the incident notes so customer messages stay in the systems intended to hold them.

Check whether the website actually accepted the submission, whether an integration attempted delivery and whether the CRM created or updated a record. Each stage answers a different question. An inbox notification can help you locate a record, but it does not tell you whether the CRM assigned it to the right owner.

Find the first stage that stopped working

• No accepted submission: check the public form, validation and server response.
• Accepted submission with no delivery attempt: inspect the queue or scheduled worker that hands records to the CRM.
• Delivery rejected: check the recorded response for expired access, missing fields, unexpected values or provider limits.
• CRM record exists but is hard to find: check duplicate handling, routing rules, filters and ownership.

Look for the first affected record and the most recent successful one. Compare those times with changes to forms, credentials, required fields and CRM rules. A timing match is a lead to investigate. Verify it with a controlled test.

Give the sales team a temporary route

Assign one person to reconcile accepted enquiries during the interruption. Have them review the protected submission store or approved inbox on a schedule and record which contacts have received a reply. If you need to add records manually, retain the original submission reference so they can be matched later.

Make the fallback proportionate to the incident. A CRM delivery delay may leave the public form usable if submissions are safely retained and somebody is handling them. If the website cannot retain submissions, route visitors to an approved contact option and confirm that someone monitors it.

Recover the backlog without duplicating follow-ups

Build a list of accepted submissions from the affected window. Mark each as present in the CRM, already handled manually, still pending or requiring review. Use a stable submission reference to match records. A shared email address alone is insufficient because the same customer can ask about more than one project.

Replay a small set first. Verify the resulting record, owner and any notification or customer message triggered downstream. Reconcile ambiguous cases before replaying them. An integration that times out after the receiving system has accepted a record can create duplicates if every timeout is treated as a definite rejection.

Prove recovery from the public form

Submit a fresh test through the public site and check acceptance, delivery, CRM ownership and the expected confirmation. Repeat for forms that use different routing rules. Then reconcile the backlog against your original list and assign an owner to any remaining exceptions.

Track the age of the oldest pending enquiry and the number of delivery failures so the team can see a growing backlog before the inbox goes quiet. A short runbook should name the owner, the evidence to collect and the safe route for replay.

CONSAI builds CRM and enquiry workflows around the records a team actually needs. For the next handover, see our enquiry-to-proposal guide. Tell us where your current handover breaks down.

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