Hail on Tuesday, a Flooded Inbox by Thursday: Storm Lead Intake for AccuLynx

Forty-eight hours after the hail, counted by channel

After a storm, leads arrive through every door at once, and each door reaches AccuLynx by its own route. Website forms come through your site's integration. Tracked calls and form fills arrive through the CallRail AppConnection as unassigned leads. Door knocks come from canvass apps: AccuLynx's integrations page lists SalesRabbit and Spotio as lead partners, alongside Angi Leads. Each route works on its own. Together, in one frantic week, they produce the same household several times.

AccuLynx was built for exactly this kind of company. Its home page says it is designed for roofers that "primarily focus on residential insurance restoration and retail roofing," and its integrations page lists two storm data sources, HailWatch and CoreLogic Hail Maps. The software is ready for storm work. The weak point is usually the website, where one contact form asks for a name and a message and leaves the sorting to whoever reads the inbox. The AccuLynx integration hub covers the full connection; this guide is the storm-week slice of it.

Six triage questions that sort a storm lead before anyone dials

A storm form should ask only what changes the office's next move. Every question below maps to something AccuLynx stores, and every one can be answered by a homeowner standing in the driveway with a phone and a soggy ceiling.

The insurer list lives in your account, and the API can read it with Get Insurance Companies. AccuLynx's own lead guide treats insurance as a detail added after the job exists, which suits a storm week: capture what the homeowner knows, let the rep confirm it, then set the insurer with Update Job Insurance Company. Our lead forms page holds the full field map for every other form on the site.

Lead sources for a storm, created before the clouds arrive

AccuLynx lead sources come as parents and children, and only active ones are visible to the API. The API cannot create a source. So the setup happens in the office, in the off-season: a parent source for the website and a child for each page or campaign that matters, such as the hail landing page, the wind damage page and the postcard drop. When a big storm hits, the office adds one child named for it, and the site starts tagging leads with it that afternoon.

Why bother? Because three months later you will want to know what the June hail produced: how many leads, how many inspections, how many signed contracts. A source that says Website cannot answer. One that says Website, June hail landing page can, and the dashboards and reporting page shows how to turn those sources into a pipeline view. For paid storm campaigns, the marketing attribution guide covers carrying the ad click into the job.

A lead source that says Website is a shrug written into a database.

Claim language: what the storm page says and what it never says

Storm pages sell, and insurance is where selling goes wrong. DataCram gives no insurance or legal advice. The storm pages we write describe what the roofing company does, not what an insurer will decide. That keeps the copy accurate, and it ties the homeowner's expectations to facts instead of hope.

The first-minute text, from a number the office can see

In a storm week the website can answer before a person can. Within a minute of a storm form, the homeowner gets a short text confirming the request, saying what happens next and giving the office number. The real conversation waits for a person. Our own LeadBolt software, shown in our work, exists because we think speed wins jobs: it answers website, Google, Meta, Angi, Yelp and phone leads in under a minute and follows up until the appointment is on the calendar.

Which system sends the text depends on what you own. AccuLynx's Text Messaging add-on sends from a local number, logs texts to the job file and can trigger automated texts on job events. Without it, the site sends through your own messaging provider and records the text on the contact in AccuLynx with Create Contact Log. Either way, the site checks the SMS opt-out details AccuLynx keeps on the contact before texting, and texts only people who agreed to it.

Storm alerts to past customers go only to those who opted in; a hailstorm is not consent. Twilio says anyone sending application texts over a 10DLC number to the US must register for A2P 10DLC. The rules, stated carefully and without legal advice, are on our AccuLynx SMS page, and why the first business to answer wins explains the urgency.

One roof, three reports: keeping storm duplicates out of AccuLynx

Duplicates peak in storm weeks because one household reaches you three ways: a canvasser knocks, a spouse fills in the web form, someone calls the number on the yard sign. Each route creates its own record unless something stops it.

• Search before create on the website. AccuLynx's lead guide starts with a contact search, and the site follows it, so a web form from a known homeowner attaches to her existing contact.
• Watch the other doors. Leads from call tracking, canvass apps and partners arrive by their own routes. AccuLynx's Contact Added and Job Created webhooks let the site see them and compare a new web lead with a call that came in ten minutes earlier.
• Flag rather than guess. When a match is likely but not certain, the site adds a job message to the existing record and flags it for the office. A person decides which record survives.
• One tap, one job. A homeowner who presses submit three times on a weak signal produces one job, because every submission carries an ID the site checks before sending.
• A morning duplicate review. During a surge, someone spends ten minutes each morning on the flagged list. It costs less than two reps driving to the same house.

Webhooks need care. AccuLynx's guidelines say the listener has 10 seconds to respond, should expect duplicate events, and loses its subscription after too many errors. Our AccuLynx API guide covers the mechanics, and AccuLynx's webhook guidelines are public.

A storm-week intake plan, from the off-season to the post-mortem

1. 1

   Build the sources in the off-season

   Create the website parent lead source, its children and a test source in AccuLynx before you need them. The API only uses sources that already exist.

2. 2

   Write the storm form and its pages

   Six triage questions at most, the phone number above the form, and claim language your attorney has read. One landing page per hazard your area actually sees, such as hail or wind.

3. 3

   Choose the text-back

   Pick the sender, AccuLynx's add-on or your own provider, write the first-minute message, and confirm your consent wording and 10DLC registration.

4. 4

   Rehearse on the live account

   AccuLynx documents no sandbox, so send test storm leads under the test source, check category, priority, trade and notes, and close them out the same day.

5. 5

   Put booking into storm mode

   If the site books inspections, switch to request mode so homeowners pick preferred windows and the office confirms. The online booking page explains both modes.

6. 6

   Add the storm's child source when it hits

   One new child source named for the event, mapped on the site the same day.

7. 7

   Run the morning review

   Flagged duplicates, failed sends and urgent leads first. The list should be empty by the time the inspectors leave the yard.

8. 8

   Count the results by source

   Two weeks after the storm, count leads, inspections and signed jobs for each child source, and decide what to keep for the next one.

What a storm-ready site costs, and a demo of one

Our roofing demo's storm center shows one way a storm page can work: a live storm tracker drawing on National Weather Service and Storm Prediction Center data. The demo's storm damage repair page shows the service side. It is a demonstration site we built, not a client, and it is not connected to AccuLynx. For a real roofer, American Roofing & Waterproofing in Phoenix, we built landing pages for monsoon and wind damage beside a free inspection offer. We do not claim that client uses AccuLynx.

Storm intake on an existing site is quoted after a free review. A new site is a fixed price from $1,500, online booking included, with the recommended 51 to 70 page package at $5,750, per the web design pricing page, with 0% financing at 25% down. Storm-season ads run through our PPC advertising service or a local marketing plan from $575 a month, depending on complexity, setup and budget. Start with a free site audit, or read our roofing website marketing ideas while the skies are clear.