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Follow-ups, tasks and appointments

The three ways work gets scheduled, and which to use when.

2 min readUpdated 30 July 2026
Signature feature
Lead Loss Protection — six detectors, running nightly
Going cold
no activity, 14+ days

Open leads nobody has touched. Ranked by score, so the most convertible stale lead surfaces first.

Overdue callbacks
promised, now past due

A follow-up somebody committed to and did not make. It goes back to the top of the queue, not into a report.

Hot and untouched
high score, never called

The most expensive failure in the list — a lead the scorer rates highly that no agent has dialled.

SLA breach
first-response clock

Per source and per centre. A lead that waited longer than you promised is flagged against the rule it broke.

Parked leads
held, then auto-woken

Deliberately held leads wake themselves back up on their own date. Parking is not a place leads go to die.

Unassigned
no owner

Detected and re-distributed. A lead with no owner is a lead with nobody accountable for calling it.

Each detector produces a queue with a reason attached, not a dashboard tile. A finding you cannot act on from where you read it is a report, not a protection.

Three different objects, and people conflate them. Here is the distinction.

ObjectUse whenAppears in
CallbackYou promised to call this person at a specific timeCallback queue
TaskSomething needs doing that is not a callTasks
AppointmentYou and the customer have agreed to meetAppointments, calendar

Callbacks

The most important of the three, because a missed callback is a lost deal roughly as often as it is a rescheduled one.

Book one from any lead, or automatically by moving a lead to a stage with Requires callback set.

They appear in the Callbacks queue ordered by due time, with overdue ones first and a badge in the sidebar.

States

  • Pending — scheduled, not yet due or not yet actioned
  • Completed — the call happened
  • Missed — the slot passed with no call
  • Rescheduled — moved to a new time, linked to the new callback

Follow-up adherence is completed ÷ (completed + missed). Rescheduled callbacks do not count against it, which is deliberate — moving a commitment honestly is not the same as dropping it.

Tasks

For work that is not a phone call: send a quote, collect a document, update a record, chase internally.

A task has a title, a due date, an assignee and a type. Overdue tasks surface on the dashboard.

Tasks can be created by automation, which is how "when a lead reaches Qualified, create a task to send the proposal" works. See Automation workflows.

Appointments

A meeting — a site visit, a demo, a consultation.

Appointments carry a start time, duration, location and a host. Their state tracks what actually happened:

  • Scheduled
  • Confirmed
  • Attended
  • No show
  • Cancelled

The gap between booked and attended is your show rate, and it is one of the more revealing numbers in the product. A high booking rate with a poor show rate usually means appointments are being booked to end a call rather than because the customer intends to come.

Reminders

Appointment reminders can go out by WhatsApp or email at a configurable interval before the start time. Set this up in Settings → Lead Workflow.

SLA timers

Separately from all three, leads carry a first-response SLA. Set first_response_sla_minutes in Settings → Lead Workflow and every new lead starts a timer.

If nobody touches the lead before it expires, the breach is recorded and the owner is notified — at the time, not in a monthly report when it is too late to do anything.

Set to 0 to disable. It is off by default, because an SLA nobody agreed to just generates noise.

Something unclear or missing? Tell us and we will fix the page — send us a note.

Follow-ups, tasks and appointments — Documentation — atomcrm.ai