Someone fills out your contact form. Good news, you've got a lead. Now what?
On a lot of small business sites, the honest answer is: it sits in a dashboard tab you open once a week if you remember it's there. That's not a form problem, that's a habit problem, and it's a common one. A form nobody checks in time to respond to might as well not exist. The visitor moves on to the next search result and calls someone else instead.
Cantrip has a fix for this that doesn't involve hiring anyone or writing a line of code: a built-in Zapier connection. Turn it on under your website's Integrations settings, copy the API key it generates, and use that key to connect your account inside Zapier. That's the whole setup on Cantrip's end.
Once it's connected, every new form submission becomes something Zapier can pick up and hand off somewhere else. Zapier's whole job is connecting apps, way more of them than any one company could support on its own, so what "somewhere else" actually looks like is up to you. A new lead can land as a row in a Google Sheet, get added as a contact in Mailchimp or HubSpot, post to a Slack channel, or trigger a text to your phone. Cantrip didn't build any of those individual connections. Zapier already did, and Cantrip just plugs into it.
Two honest caveats worth knowing before you set this up. First, it's not instant. Zapier checks in on a schedule rather than firing the second someone hits submit, so treat it as "shows up soon," not "shows up now." Second, Zapier has its own free tier and its own limits once you're running more than an occasional Zap, and that's between you and Zapier, not something Cantrip controls.
The connection runs the other direction too, in a smaller way. If you turn it on for a specific collection, like your blog, another app can create posts inside Cantrip through the same API key. It's a one-way action, not a trigger. Cantrip won't notify Zapier when you publish something new, but a scheduling tool or spreadsheet on your end can push a new post in.
None of this is complicated once it's wired up, and that's kind of the point. The fanciest contact form on earth is worthless if the leads it collects have to be dug up on purpose. Sending them somewhere you already look takes about ten minutes, and it doesn't cost anything extra on Cantrip's side.