Setting up lead capture and consent
A new agent already captures leads: from the visitor's third message the widget offers a contact form, and nothing is saved unless they tick the consent box, which the server checks before it writes anything.
Last checked against the running product on 30 August 2026.
There are two separate consents in the widget and it is worth keeping them apart. One is about remembering the visitor on their own browser. The other is about you contacting them. This article is about the second.
Know what you get without changing anything
An agent created in Garuda starts with lead capture switched on, a follow-up prompt, and a form asking for name, email and phone. From the visitor's third message onward the widget offers that form. A Contact the team button also appears under the conversation once the visitor has sent a message and the agent has replied, so they can ask for follow-up sooner.
Decide when the form should appear
Open Widget, then the Customize tab, and look at section 5, Toggle options. Show lead form moves the form to the front: it is shown the moment the panel opens, before any conversation. Leave it off and the form stays where it is, offered part-way through.
Autostart and Show lead form are mutually exclusive
One opens the conversation immediately and the other gates it behind a form, so Garuda refuses to store both. Switching one on switches the other off in front of you.
Confirm submissions are actually saved
Section 6 of the Customize tab holds a switch called Save submissions as leads. When it is off, the form is drawn but nothing submitted is kept, and the section says so. It is only visible while Show lead form is on, so turn that on to check the switch, then turn it back off if you would rather the form stayed later in the conversation.
Check what the visitor is agreeing to
Every contact form carries a required checkbox reading I agree to be contacted about my request. It cannot be removed, and the form will not submit until it is ticked. If the agent has a privacy policy URL, a View privacy policy link appears beneath it.
When a lead is saved, Garuda stores the evidence beside it:
- the consent itself, recorded as granted
- the version of the notice the visitor was shown
- whether the privacy notice was separately accepted
- the moment of consent, kept only when the browser supplies a real timestamp
- the conversation it came from
Set the fields you actually need
The form must be able to reach the person: a submission with neither an email address nor a phone number is refused. Everything beyond that is your choice, and the builder is covered in Building a custom lead form.
Test it end to end
On your own site, open the widget, have a short conversation, submit the form, then check Leads in the portal. The new row should carry the source
widget.
The other consent — the one headed Your chat, your choice — appears when the widget first opens and offers Remember this chat or Use once. Choosing to be remembered stores one opaque token in that browser, scoped to that agent alone, so the same browser talking to a different customer's Garuda agent cannot be linked to this one. Declining keeps the conversation to that visit.
The prompt wording and the three-exchange delay are not editable yet
The portal has no input for the follow-up prompt, the number of visitor messages before the form is offered, or the privacy sentence under the form. They are stored on the agent and carried through untouched by every save. Email info@ravan.ai if you need one of them changed.
Leads you type in by hand are not consented captures
Manual add on the Leads screen stores the row with the source manual and records that no consent was collected there. Record consent separately before contacting somebody you added that way.
If it still does not work
The form never appears in the conversation
Check Save submissions as leads is on. With it off and Show lead form off too, the widget has no reason to offer a form at all — not even the Contact the team button.
A visitor says their details would not send
The consent box is required and the form names it in red until it is ticked. Beyond that, an email address must parse as an address and a phone number must be at least seven digits after formatting characters are stripped.
Submissions stopped being saved
Lead capture needs an active subscription, the same as every other widget surface. Check Billing. A workspace over its rolling 30-day conversation allowance will also stop opening new conversations.
The same person appears once, not twice
That is deliberate. A second submission in the same conversation with the same email or phone updates the existing lead rather than creating a duplicate.
Related articles
- ConfiguringBuilding a custom lead formSection 6 of Widget, Customize lets you set the heading, the submit text and up to 20 fields, each with a type and an identifier that decides where the answer is stored.
- OperatingReading conversations and leadsConversations holds every stored transcript with its page metadata; Leads holds the contacts captured with consent. Both screens are read-only: you cannot type a reply into a visitor's chat from here.
- OperatingExporting your leadsExport CSV on the Leads screen downloads every lead in your workspace as a spreadsheet file, optionally filtered to one status, with eleven columns and a UTF-8 byte order mark.