Have you had the situation where you have many conversations coming through WhatsApp, but then it becomes difficult to measure which part of the funnel your contacts are in or compare results against other sources (for example, campaigns outside of Atom)?
The Customer Stage component helps you classify prospects and customers in a standardized way to improve funnel visibility, reporting, and, if you enable CAPI, the sending of events to Meta.
🎯 What is the Customer Stage component for?
This component allows companies to classify prospects and customers according to their purchase interest or reason for contact. Its objective is:
Standardize the classification of contacts (for example, for sales or service).
Improve visibility of the flow's value through metrics and analysis.
Facilitate tracking of progress within the funnel (especially in sales flows).
💡 Practical example: In an automotive business, you can use it to differentiate users who only want information (without immediate purchase intention) from those with a clear purchase intention who need to urgently speak with an advisor.
🔀 Types of stages: Sales or Service?
In the component configuration you can choose between two main approaches:
Lead Stage: Ideal for sales flows and lead generation.
Service Type: Ideal for customer service and support flows.
Note: It's possible to use both types in the same flow if you have a mixed tree. For example, you can start with sales and, if the user asks for support, route them towards service stages in that specific branch.
📊 Available stages in Lead Stage
These are the standard stages of the sales funnel and what they mean within your flow:
Awareness: First interaction. For example, the user arrives via WhatsApp and receives initial information.
Lead: The user interacts and the bot collects basic data or confirms initial interest.
MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead): Qualified interest. The user requests a catalog, price list, or asks more specific questions.
SQL (Sales Qualified Lead): Clear purchase intention. Inquires about availability, requests a quote, or seeks to coordinate contact with an advisor.
Opportunity: Active negotiation with personalized follow-up and possible sales closure.
Customer: The user is already a customer (completed purchase or confirmed customer according to your business criteria).
⚠️ Important: It's not mandatory to use all stages if they don't apply to your actual process. The key is that the stages reflect clear and comparable criteria.
🗒️ Tips for defining your stages well (Lead, MQL, SQL):
Align criteria: Make sure that "MQL" or "SQL" mean exactly the same thing to you, your sales team, and the flow.
Don't advance stages "just because": From one stage to another there must be a real change (new data collected, a concrete action, or an intention closer to purchase).
Reflect reality: If the customer skips stages in their natural process (for example, goes from Lead directly to SQL), configure it that way in the flow.
🛠️ Service Type stages
Service stages depend 100% on the nature of your business (for example: support, warranties, follow-up, post-sale, etc.).
You can create custom stages by typing them directly in the selector and clicking "Create stage".
Recommendation: Even though you may measure service today with tags or other resources, incorporating Service Type will help you leave the information much more structured for future analysis.
🌐 Relationship with Meta's CAPI (Conversions API)
CAPI is the mechanism that allows you to send events directly to Meta to build a conversion history associated with your stages.
Automatic sending: When you enable CAPI at the client level, event sending is performed automatically for prospect stages (Lead Stage).
Zero extra configurations: You don't need to add additional configurations "per stage" within each flow. Once enabled, it starts sending information based on your active flows.
Data building: Although the immediate impact on your ads may vary, enabling it from today is vital to build history and optimize your future campaigns.
How to verify if CAPI works? You can validate it from your Meta environment (Ads Manager / events section), checking that the connection is active and there are recent events coming in.
✅ General best practices
🧩 Clear criteria: Define exactly what data or action converts a user into Lead, MQL, or SQL.
🤝 Alignment: Agree on these definitions with your entire team so that analyses are accurate.
➡️ Justified advancement: Move the customer to a stage only when there is a real change in intention or information.
✂️ Less is more: Don't use all stages if your sales process is shorter.
🎯 Smart assignment: Route to human agents preferably in the "hottest" stages (MQL/SQL) and use automation/remarketing to nurture the rest.
🔌 Enable CAPI: Connect Atom with Meta to build history and boost the measurement of your advertising budget.
🧪 Run tests: Test variations of your flow (A/B testing) to discover what structure improves conversion per stage.
Measure the success of every conversation! 🚀
By correctly classifying your contacts and enabling CAPI, you gain full visibility of your funnel. Apply these stages in your flows and turn your chats into true business opportunities. ✅