Articles / Article 11
The replies you meant to send
You saw the missed calls. You meant to ring back. How a busy day turns into a week of silence, and how to stop it.
Most work that slips away isn't lost when the phone rings. It's lost at about eight o'clock that night, when you look at everyone waiting for an answer and decide it can wait until tomorrow.
Here's how Leon describes it from his own days on site:
"I often don't answer calls during the day because I'm working. I could be under a sink, or in the middle of wiring something up, and I can't stop. Some days I know that if I answer every call, the work won't get done. So I tell myself I'll ring or text back later. Then the day ends, I'm shattered, and there's half a dozen missed calls and messages waiting. I can't face another two hours of replies. I need some down time. A day or two goes by, more come in, and before long I'm telling myself there's no point replying to the ones from three days ago. They'll have found someone else by now."
If that sounds familiar, you're not lazy and you're not bad at business. You're tired, and the pile is doing what piles do.
How the pile grows
Nobody decided to ignore Monday's callers. The pile decided for them.
Why it gets harder, not easier
On the day, a reply is one line: sorry I missed you, what's the job? Three days later it needs an apology first, and the apology is the bit that makes you put it off again.
The thought that they'll have found someone else is often right, which makes it easy to stop trying. But it isn't always right. Plenty of jobs aren't urgent, and some of those people are still waiting to hear from somebody.
Clearing it without a two-hour evening
- Reply on the day, even if it's one line. "Got your message, I'm on a job, I'll ring you at half four." It takes seconds and it stops the clock.
- Reply at set times, not at the end. Tea break, lunch, back in the van. Ten minutes three times a day beats two hours you won't face at night.
- Oldest first. The newest messages will still be warm tomorrow. The oldest won't.
- Send the late ones anyway. "Sorry for the slow reply, are you still after someone for the bathroom?" The worst they can say is they're sorted. Some won't be.
- Keep it in one place. If calls are in one app, texts in another and WhatsApps in a third, the pile is bigger than you think and you can't see all of it.
What happens to the call in the first place is in answering the phone with both hands full. How quickly that first reply needs to land is in how fast you need to reply to an enquiry.
What we do about it
Cobalt sends that first line for you. Anyone whose call you miss gets a text back within seconds. The receptionist answers in your business's name when you can't, and books them into your diary. Every new enquiry is followed up automatically for a week, so nobody sits in the pile waiting for you to find the energy. It all lands in one record you can see from your phone.
You can ring our own receptionist on 07401 200177 and hear it for yourself. The full list is on what we can do, and both plans are priced in public.
Watch an enquiry get answered.
Fifteen minutes, on real screens. A call answered and booked, a website enquiry replied to, a missed call texted back, and the follow up that runs after it. Nothing to prepare.