A contractor can replace a website without replacing the customers who found them through it. That sounds obvious as a business statement. It only holds in software if the data model says so too.
The trouble with a website-first model
If every lead belongs to a website, the customer's history is tied to that website. Redesign the site, add a second one, or take a call from someone who never visited it, and the record of who that customer is starts to splinter.
OAS treats a website as one way a customer reaches a contractor, not as the owner of the relationship.
Four separate records
In OAS, the contractor's business owns four kinds of record, and each one belongs to the business directly:
- Customers. The person or household the business is dealing with, recorded independently of any website. This is OAS's Contact record; it can exist before any job is won.
- Leads. Each inquiry or piece of potential work. A customer can have many leads over the years.
- Timeline entries. An append-only history of what happened: an inquiry arriving, a status change, a note from the team. Entries attach to a lead, a customer or both.
- Websites. A business can have one, several or none.
A lead records how the customer got in touch: through a website, a phone call, a text, an email, a chat, a referral or an entry made by hand. It can also name the website it came through. That link is optional. If a website is retired, its leads stay exactly where they were, and so do the customers behind them.
A lead is linked to a customer when the match is safe. When it is not safe, for example when a phone number and an email point at two different existing customers, the lead is kept anyway and the match is left for a person to decide, never guessed.
How a website inquiry flows today
When a visitor sends an estimate request through a contractor's website, OAS files it under that contractor's business. It becomes one lead, matched to a customer record or starting a new one, with an entry on the timeline.
Our acceptance test runs that path end to end in a browser against a production build, using a synthetic business. It checks that one request becomes exactly one lead, one customer and one timeline entry under the right business. It also slips another business's identifiers into the form and the address, and checks that they are ignored: the lead still lands with the business whose website the visitor was on.
Leads move; the relationship stays
Leads change status: new, contacted, qualified, estimate sent, won or lost. Each change is written to the timeline, so the history shows how the work progressed, not only where it ended up.
Your customer history should survive a website redesign, and stay useful as you find new ways to receive work.
What is not here yet
Website inquiries arrive in OAS automatically today. A phone call, text, email, chat or referral can be recorded as a lead by the OAS team, by hand, and it joins the same customer and timeline as a website inquiry would.
Automatic intake from phone, text or email for a contractor's customers is not built yet. The model has room for those channels. We will describe each one as working only once its own intake and attribution have been built and tested.
If you run a contracting business and want your customer history kept in one place, whatever channel it arrives through, get in touch.