Recovering an Archived Lead

This tutorial gives you practice with the ARCHIVED → CONTACTING re-entry edge. You’ll find an archived lead in the demo, read the engagement signals that suggest they’re warming back up, manually reactivate them, and see how the system records the recovery. Plan on 8 minutes.

By the end you’ll know:

• How to spot a recoverable archived lead vs. one that’s correctly set aside
• The two ways a lead leaves ARCHIVED — automatic re-entry from behavioral signals, and manual reactivation
• What changes in the timeline when you reactivate a lead

Before you start

Open the demo:

https://app.demo.homestar.ink/admin/leads/board

Click Admin demo login, then scroll the board to find the ARCHIVED column on the right side. The example in this tutorial uses a demo character named Dana Reyes — if your demo refresh has renamed the seed characters, pick whichever ARCHIVED card has the highest temperature score and the longest timeline.

Step 1 — read the column shape, not individual cards

Look at the ARCHIVED column as a whole before opening anything. You’re looking for one signal in particular: a temperature chip that isn’t Cold.

Most leads in ARCHIVED will be Cold — that’s the natural state of someone who stopped engaging long enough to time out. But a Warm or even Hot temperature chip in this column is the system telling you: this lead came back to the site, and you should look.

A Warm-or-Hot card in ARCHIVED is the system telling you: this lead came back on their own, look at them.

Step 2 — open the lead and read the timeline backwards

Click into Dana Reyes (or whichever card you picked). The timeline is the canonical history — read it from the bottom up to understand what happened.

You’ll see, roughly:

─ Earlier today ────────────────────────────────
  Scribe — Temperature signal: +14
  detail: 4 property_view events, 1 favorite_added

─ Yesterday ────────────────────────────────────
  Scribe — Temperature signal: +6
  detail: search_query, returned_visit

─ 3 months ago ─────────────────────────────────
  Scribe — State change: CONTACTING → ARCHIVED
  triggered by: timeout_21d_no_response

─ 4 months ago ─────────────────────────────────
  You (or a teammate) — Email logged
  "Sent follow-up about the West End listing."

─ 4 months ago ─────────────────────────────────
  Scribe — Lead created
  source: contact_form

Two things are happening on this card:

• Old archive transition. The lead went quiet, timed out, got archived. That’s the original timeout.
• Recent temperature signals. The lead came back to the site on their own this week — property views, a favorite, a returned visit. The system noticed and bumped the temperature.

Those recent signals are why the card isn’t Cold anymore. It’s saying: this person is shopping again, even though they never replied to you.

Step 3 — decide whether to reactivate

Not every warming-up archived lead should be pulled back into your active workflow. A few questions to ask:

Question	If yes, reactivate. If no, leave archived.
Are the recent signals concrete? (property views, favorites, return visits — not just one page load)	Concrete = yes. One bounce = no.
Did you have a real conversation with them before they went dark?	Yes = warmer recovery is possible. No = they never engaged with you, just the site.
Is the original assigned agent still active?	Yes = they should be the one to reach back out. No = the lead will need re-routing.
Has it been long enough that their situation might have changed? (3+ months)	Yes — that’s often why they’re back.

For Dana Reyes — concrete signals, prior conversation in the timeline, several months elapsed — this is a textbook reactivation case.

Step 4 — manually reactivate the lead

You can let the system pull the lead back automatically (it will eventually, if the temperature climbs high enough), or you can do it now.

1. On Dana’s detail page, find the lifecycle action panel.
2. Pick Reactivate (or Move to CONTACTING).
3. Add a short note — “Saw recent activity on West End listings, reaching out.”
4. Save.

The card moves from ARCHIVED to CONTACTING. Two new rows appear at the top of the timeline:

─ Just now ─────────────────────────────────────
  You — State change: ARCHIVED → CONTACTING
  triggered by: lead_re_engaged
  reason: manual reactivation

─ Just now ─────────────────────────────────────
  You — Note added
  "Saw recent activity on West End listings, reaching out."

Step 5 — make first contact (within reason)

The lead is now in CONTACTING. The SLA clock does NOT restart for a reactivated lead — the 5-minute target is for fresh NEW inquiries. You have a normal follow-up timeframe.

That said: reaching out within a day is what makes the reactivation worth doing. The signal you saw (renewed browsing) is fresh. If you wait a week to call, the moment is gone.

Log your outreach the way you would for any CONTACTING lead — phone call, email, or text via the activity log. The pattern from your first day applies: log the attempt, watch the timeline update.

What if the original agent is gone

One real concern with reactivation: the lead’s assigned_agent_id may point at an agent who’s no longer at the brokerage, on leave, or otherwise unavailable. The system has a known gap here — re-engagement events don’t currently re-route the lead to a fresh eligible agent. If you reactivate a lead and notice the assigned agent is stale, manually reassign it before reaching out.

Note

This is a tracked TODO in the lifecycle implementation. Until re-routing on re-engagement ships, the right pattern is: when you manually reactivate, check the assigned agent at the same time. If they’re gone, reassign and then call.

What you’ve practiced

• Spotting a recoverable archived lead by reading temperature signals against the column-default expectation
• Reading a timeline backwards to understand what happened to a lead
• Manually triggering ARCHIVED → CONTACTING via the lifecycle action panel
• Watching the timeline capture both the system’s observation and your manual action

Where to go next

If you want to…	Read…
Understand why archive is recoverable in the first place	Why archive isn’t terminal
Get fluent at reading timeline rows	Read the timeline
Know what the temperature chip on a card is computed from	Temperature signals
Look up the valid transition rules in one place	State machine card