Business impact

<aside> 💡

The problem: New form submissions landed in an inbox with no way to tell if the same person had already reached out, no signal separating an urgent inquiry from a routine one, and nothing flagging an inquiry that had simply gone unanswered.

What it looked like before: A duplicate submission could trigger duplicate outreach, and an inquiry could sit unanswered indefinitely with no one noticing until the customer followed up themselves.

What we built: A pipeline that checks every new inquiry against existing contacts, tags its priority automatically, and logs and alerts the team instantly — plus a separate SLA watcher that sends exactly one follow-up reminder if an inquiry is still unanswered after 2 real business days.

Result: No more duplicate contact records from repeat submissions, high-priority inquiries are visibly flagged the moment they arrive, and nothing falls through the cracks silently — every inquiry either gets handled or surfaces a reminder, with failures alerting the team instead of failing invisibly.

</aside>

n8n automation that captures new website inquiries, checks for duplicate contacts, flags priority, and creates a follow-up reminder if an inquiry sits unhandled for 2 business days.

Project details

Context:

• Business/industry: IT & SaaS / Customer Support Services
• Current process (baseline assumption): New form submissions land in an inbox with no deduplication, no priority signal, and no tracking of how long an inquiry has gone unanswered.

Problem:

• No way to detect if the same person submitted the form twice, risking duplicate contacts and duplicate outreach.
• No signal to separate an urgent inquiry from a routine one.
• No SLA mechanism: an inquiry can sit unanswered indefinitely with nothing flagging it.

Solution

<aside> 🧠

A webhook captures the form submission, checks it against existing contacts by email/phone, tags a priority level from simple keyword rules, logs it to Google Sheets, and notifies the team on Telegram. A separate daily-scheduled workflow scans for inquiries still marked "new" after 2 business days (real business-day math, not a calendar-day approximation) and sends a follow-up reminder, then marks the row so the reminder doesn't repeat every day. A third, isolated workflow handles error alerting for both.

Tools used: n8n, Google Sheets, Telegram Bot API, Gmail API, Webhooks.

</aside>

Solution logic:

1. Webhook receives the form POST (name, email, phone, company, message).