Glossary
Offline capture
Recording a lead on a phone or tablet that has no network at the time, keeping it on the device and sending it when the connection returns, without creating it twice. It is what makes lead capture usable in an exhibition hall, where the network fails for most of the day.
Exhibition halls are the worst networks most salespeople use all year: thousands of phones on the same cells, a Wi-Fi sized for the organiser's staff, and steel everywhere. A capture tool that needs a connection at the moment of capture fails there, and fails at the moment that matters.
What offline actually means
Three things have to be true. The page itself must already be on the device, loaded earlier while there was a connection, so it opens with no network at all. Each entry must be written to the device first and sent second, so a failed send loses nothing. And each entry must carry its own identifier, chosen on the device, so that sending it twice, which will happen when a connection drops mid-send, creates one lead on the server rather than two.
What it does not cover
The visitor's own phone. When a visitor scans a QR code and opens the exhibitor's form on their phone, the page loads over the visitor's connection, and nothing the exhibitor does offline helps. Offline capture covers the devices the exhibitor controls: the salesperson's phone and the stand's kiosk.
The cost of a timeout
A request that hangs is worse than one that fails, because the person waits. A tool built for a hall treats a slow request as a failure after a few seconds, shows the salesperson or the visitor that the entry is saved, and retries in the background. The thank-you screen must not depend on the network.
In LeadShake, trade show mode and the visitor tablet both keep every entry on the device and send it when the network returns; the server recognises an entry it has already received and answers with the original lead, so a retry never duplicates a contact. The lead capture entry covers the rest of the vocabulary.
Questions
Not necessarily. A web page can be made to open without network and to store entries on the device, provided it was opened once with a connection beforehand. That is how LeadShake's trade show mode and visitor tablet work: added to the home screen like an app, with nothing to install from a store.
Related terms
- Lead capture
- Collecting the contact details of someone you met, with their agreement, so you can follow up. It is the reverse of a business card: instead of giving your details away, you record theirs.
- Kiosk mode
- A self-service screen left on a stand where visitors enter their own details, and which resets after each person. In lead capture it means a tablet showing the exhibitor's form under the exhibitor's account, as opposed to the visitor's own phone or the salesperson's.
- QR fallback
- A QR code shown alongside an NFC card so phones that cannot tap, or have NFC switched off, reach the same page with their camera. Any card that relies on NFC alone loses those visitors.