The CRM that fills itself, and answers back
- Trigger
- POST /relay
- Lands in
- The Contacts dashboard
- Setup
- 5 min
- Needs
- Nothing else
New enquiry from Michael Scott
“Do you offer an annual plan for teams of 20?”
- [email protected]
- Company
- Dunder Mifflin
- Stream
- contactform
- First seen
- via /pricing
Replying here sends a threaded email from your own inbox address and assigns the contact to whoever answered.
What changes on day one
Nothing here needs a migration, a data model, or a week of setup. You point one form or one inbox at Viably and these four things start being true the same afternoon.
The form fill, the enquiry email, and the payment write themselves into one record the moment they happen. The gap between something happening and somebody logging it, which is where most small-team CRM data quietly dies, stops existing.
Contacts opens on the people who wrote in, still have nobody assigned, and have not been answered. It is a work list rather than a database, so the first thing your team sees each morning is the customer nearest to giving up on you.
An enquiry lands in Slack with a Reply button attached. Your reply goes out as a threaded email from your own inbox address, and the contact is assigned to you as you send, so the record and the response happen in the same motion.
Because a person's first touch and their eventual payment sit on one record, the reporting can answer which stream, source, and campaign produced paying customers, along with the median time they took to convert.
Invite @Via to the Slack channel where you want webhooks to appear. Without this, Viably accepts your webhook but cannot post to the channel.
Open Webhook Relay in the dashboard and add an endpoint. Pick Inbox if you want to capture an email inbox, or a standard endpoint if you are sending events from your website or backend. Both take under a minute and neither needs anything deployed on your side.
Forward your help or sales address to the inbox address Viably minted for you, or POST your form submissions with a type of contactform, leadgen, or signups. Add your payment provider the same way when you want revenue attached to the same people.
Open Contacts. The people who need answering are already at the top, each one carrying their history, their company, and anything they have paid you. Reply from the sheet or from the Slack card and the contact becomes yours.
There is no object model to plan before you can capture your first contact, and nothing to import. Send one event and the record exists, already shaped the way the reporting expects.
Capture: every channel writes to one record
Email is the identity key, so a June enquiry, a July signup, and an August payment carrying the same address land on the same person. What you get is one place to look, instead of three systems and an afternoon spent reconciling them.
A single POST with a type of contactform, leadgen, or signups creates the contact and posts it to the channel you choose. Campaign details from the landing page ride along, so the lead arrives knowing which ad or newsletter sent it.
Forward your existing address to the inbox Viably gives you and every genuine sender becomes a contact, enriched with their name and their company. Auto-replies, newsletters, bounces, and spam are filtered before they reach your list, and each one is still logged with the reason it was set aside.
Stripe connects directly, and any other provider can POST a transaction. The payment attaches to the person who paid it, which is what turns a list of leads into a pipeline with money at the end of it.
Job applications, waitlist signups, workshop tickets, and product trials all take the same route. Each one becomes a stream you can name, classify, and report on separately, so a careers form never gets counted as sales pipeline.
The same message reaching Viably twice is recorded once. When two records genuinely belong to one person, merging them keeps the whole history and the revenue with them, so your counts stay honest as your list grows.
Respond: answer a customer without leaving Slack
Capture on its own produces a tidier list of people you still have not spoken to. The part that changes a customer’s experience is the reply, so Viably sends that too, from wherever your team already is.
The Slack card carries the enquiry and a Reply button. What you write goes out as a proper email, and both sides of the conversation keep landing back in that card's thread, so the channel holds the whole exchange rather than half of it.
Open a contact and the composer sits under their full history. Press r and start typing. You can see who replied last and when, which is what stops two people answering the same customer within the same minute.
Replies send from your workspace inbox address and thread against the original message, so the customer sees one continuous conversation with your company rather than a notification from a tool they have never heard of.
Sending claims the contact for you automatically. Ownership is a by-product of doing the work, which is the only way assignment stays accurate in a team that is busy.
Track it in your own words
A sales lead, a job applicant, and a support ticket move through completely different stages, and forcing all three into one vendor’s vocabulary is how teams end up ignoring the status field entirely. Viably lets you classify each stream and then speaks that stream’s language everywhere.
Classify a stream as Sales and its contacts move through Open, Working, Won, and Lost. Classify it as Hiring and the same five states read as Applied, Reviewing, Offer, and Passed. Support reads Open, Responded, and Resolved. Product reads New, Activating, Converted, and Dormant. Your team learns one workflow and reads it in whichever words fit the work in front of them.
A workshop ticket is bought and then it is simply true, with no next state to move through, so marking that stream one-off removes the status control instead of showing your team a field that never changes.
The vocabulary resolves as the page renders, so changing how a stream is classified takes effect immediately and nothing has to be rebuilt or backfilled.
Measure what actually earned the money
Marketing reporting usually stops at the form fill, and finance reporting starts at the invoice. Because both ends live on the same contact here, the middle stops being guesswork.
Leads, sign-ups, and customers, measured over the people a source actually brought in. Walk-in customers who arrived already paying are held out of the conversion rate, because counting them was the difference between a reported 30 percent funnel and a true one.
What each channel earned, what an average customer from it is worth, and how that has moved through the month. This is the number that tells you where the next hour of marketing should go.
Of the people expecting to hear back, how many got an answer, how many are still waiting, and the median time your team took to send the first reply. Support teams buy an entire category of software for this figure alone.
The median days between meeting somebody and taking their money, measured over the people a source brought in. It tells you how long to keep nurturing before a quiet lead is genuinely cold.
Why this cannot be turned into a cold-email tool
Sending email on your behalf is a serious thing to hand a piece of software, so it is worth knowing exactly what Viably will and will not do with it.
Viably will only mail an address that already reached your workspace through something your team classified as an enquiry. There is no way to upload a list and mail it, which protects your sending reputation as much as it protects anybody’s inbox.
An address that bounced, or whose owner complained, is never mailed again, and the composer says so plainly instead of offering a button that quietly fails.
Copying a colleague on a reply is allowed only for addresses or domains your workspace has already verified through the Email power, so a reply can never be used to reach somebody who never wrote in.
Free workspaces send up to 50 replies a day and Viably+ workspaces 200, with a small per-contact cap on top. A support team answering customers will never meet these, and anything trying to behave like a campaign will.
What you stop paying for
The comparison worth making is not feature by feature, because a full sales cloud will always list more. It is whether the work gets done for the money and the setup time it costs you.
Viably+ is a flat $269 a month for the entire workspace, and the free plan never expires. A per-seat CRM at a typical $20 to $50 per person means a team of twenty is paying somewhere between $400 and $1,000 a month for the same job, and paying more every time somebody new needs to see a customer.
The usual small-team stack is a CRM for the pipeline, a shared-inbox tool for the enquiries, and an automation platform wiring the two together with a task budget attached. Capture, reply, and attribution are one product here, so there is no sync to maintain and no second bill.
No implementation partner, no object modelling, and no seat provisioning. One endpoint or one mail forward, and your first contact is captured before the meeting you were going to schedule about it.
Yes, a lightweight one. Viably captures a contact from every lead form, signup, enquiry email, and payment you send it, keeps one record per person joined by their email address, lets your team reply to that person from Slack or the dashboard, and reports how much revenue each acquisition channel produced. That is the working core of a CRM, without the fields, objects, and admin certification that come with the enterprise ones.
Two ways that matter to a small team. Viably charges one flat price for the whole workspace instead of a price per seat, so putting your tenth or fortieth colleague in front of a customer costs nothing extra. And the pipeline lives where your team already talks, so an enquiry arrives in a Slack channel with a Reply button on it rather than in a tab somebody has to remember to open.
Yes. Every captured enquiry can post to a Slack channel as a card with a Reply button. Writing a reply there sends a real email from your workspace inbox address, threads it so the customer sees one conversation, records it on that contact's timeline, and assigns the contact to whoever answered so two people never reply to the same person.
No. Point your website form or backend at your Viably endpoint with a single POST, or forward your support inbox to the address Viably gives you. Both routes create the same kind of contact, so a form fill in March and an email in June land on one person rather than two records nobody joins up.
The first event that introduced a person is kept as their origin, along with the campaign details read off the landing page they arrived through. When that person later pays, the payment attaches to the same contact, so the revenue report can say what each source, campaign, and stream actually earned instead of counting form fills nobody converted.
There is a free plan that does not expire, with one inbox address and the full contacts workspace. Viably+ is a flat $269 a month for the entire workspace and raises the limits, including three inbox addresses and a higher daily reply allowance. Neither plan charges per seat.
Yes. Contact identity is redacted for members without the right permission, and the redaction happens on the server, so the real address is never sent to a browser that should not have it. Admins see the full record.
Start capturing today
The fastest first win is the inbox you already publish. Forward it, send yourself a test message, and watch the contact appear.
Open Webhook Relay to mint your first endpoint. The free plan includes an inbox address and the full contacts workspace, and every new workspace gets a 14-day Viably+ trial without a card.
Add Viably to SlackThe Inbound Email guide turns a support or sales inbox into contacts, the Webhook Relay guide covers sending events from your website, and the Payment Webhook guide attaches revenue to the people who paid it.
Contact names and addresses are redacted for anyone without the identity permission, downloading is its own permission again, and an outsider can be given a window that closes on its own. The Roles and guest access guide covers the five roles and how to hand an investor, an auditor, or the agency running your campaigns a live view without handing over the list.