ChatCatch – Guided Chat Enquiries & Lead Capture

ChatCatch is a friendly, guided enquiry widget for service businesses. Instead of a plain “message us” button that sends a blank chat, ChatCatch walks the visitor through a short, mobile-first flow — what they need, where, and when — then hands the completed enquiry off to WhatsApp with the details already written out. Every enquiry is also saved on your site and emailed to you, so no lead is ever lost.

• Guided, not blank. A short multi-step chat produces a complete enquiry, not “Hi, I’m interested.”
• Never miss a lead. Each enquiry is saved to your site and emailed — even if the visitor doesn’t finish in WhatsApp.
• No setup headaches. It uses a normal WhatsApp click-to-chat link — no Meta Business API, no approval, no coding.

The floating chat widget, the inline guided Wizard (shortcode + block), one-click industry templates, and server-side lead capture are all included.

ChatCatch is an independent plugin and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by WhatsApp or Meta.

Privacy & data handling

ChatCatch stores a copy of each enquiry on your own site so you never lose a lead. This is what it collects and how it is handled:

• What is stored: only the answers the visitor chose (e.g. service, area, preferred time), the assembled message, the click-to-chat URL, and the page the enquiry came from. No IP address and no device/browser identifiers are stored with the lead.
• Where it goes: the record is saved in a custom database table on your site, and — if you set a backup email address — a plain-text copy is emailed to you. Nothing is sent to any third-party service by ChatCatch; the visitor’s own WhatsApp app delivers the message to your number.
• Public endpoint: the chat posts the enquiry to a REST endpoint (/wp-json/chatcatch/v1/lead) before opening WhatsApp. Because pages are often served from a full-page cache, the endpoint is intentionally unauthenticated; it is protected by a honeypot, per-IP rate limits, a request-size cap, a bot filter and strict server-side validation, and it performs no privileged action (it only appends one enquiry). The recipient number and message are recomputed on the server, so the request cannot redirect your leads.
• Retention: leads older than a configurable number of days (default 365) are deleted automatically.
• Uninstalling: saved leads and settings are removed on uninstall only if you tick “Delete all ChatCatch data” first; otherwise your leads are preserved.