Why website enquiries get missed

A missed enquiry does not announce itself. Nothing goes red. No report has a line on it saying eleven people tried to give you money in July and four of them gave up. The work simply does not turn up, and because you were busy that month anyway, it never occurs to you that it was supposed to.

That is what makes this different from every other leak in a small business. An unpaid invoice sits there in front of you. A missed enquiry deletes itself.

The route a message actually takes

Draw it out for your own firm and it is longer than you would guess. Somebody finds you, decides to get in touch, picks one of four or five ways of doing it, and then the message has to survive a chain of handovers before a human being with the authority to answer it reads it and does something.

Every handover is a place it can stop. Most firms have six.

The six places it falls out

One. The form goes to an address nobody is really watching

The contact form on most small business websites was set up once, years ago, pointing at whatever email address existed at the time. Sometimes that is an old personal account. Sometimes it is an info@ address that three people can see and therefore nobody owns. Sometimes the notification is going out fine and landing in a Promotions tab.

Check this week. Fill in your own contact form, with a real message, from a phone that is not on your office wifi. Then time how long it takes before anybody does anything about it. Do not tell your staff you are doing it. If the answer embarrasses you, you have found the biggest one on this list and you have found it for free.

Two. It arrives while you are up a ladder

This one is not a fault, it is the job. If you do the work as well as run the business, then for most of the working day you are not able to answer anything. My phone is on silent from eight in the morning, because nobody paying me by the day wants to watch me on it. That is the right decision on site and it is a terrible decision commercially, and both of those are true at once.

So the messages queue. Then they get answered in a block, on a Saturday, three or four hours of it, and by then some of them have gone somewhere else.

Three. The reply needs a number you have not worked out yet

This is the quiet one, and it is the one most people would not put on a list like this. The enquiry is not unanswered because you did not see it. It is unanswered because answering it properly means half an hour of pricing, and you have not had half an hour, and a holding reply feels like admitting that.

So it stays unanswered, and every day it stays unanswered it gets slightly more awkward to answer, which is its own reason not to.

Four. It arrived somewhere that is not the inbox

WhatsApp. A Facebook page nobody has logged into since the last time you posted. A Google listing with a message button on it you did not know was switched on. An Instagram request folder. Every one of those is a front door somebody built for you, and unless you have deliberately closed it or deliberately watch it, it is open and unattended.

Check this week. List every route a stranger could use to contact your business. Include the ones you did not set up. Then, for each one, name the person who looks at it and how often. Any route without a name against it is closed as far as your customer is concerned, except they cannot tell, so they think you ignored them.

Five. Somebody took it and it stayed in their head

Someone answers the phone, has a perfectly good conversation, agrees to do something, and does not write it down anywhere the business can see. Now the enquiry exists only in one person's memory, and it survives exactly as long as that person's week allows.

I lost a pharmaceutical collection this way. I agreed it, then my biggest client rang that night with an emergency and I was out in the van for forty-eight hours, and I forgot the pharma job completely. I rang afterwards. I messaged. Nothing came back, and I still do not know how big that account would have become.

Six. It was answered, once, and then dropped

The first reply goes out the same day. The customer says thanks, they will have a think. And that is the end of it, because there is no second touch anywhere in the system and no list of people who said they would have a think.

Firms tend not to count these as missed enquiries at all, because they did reply. From the customer's side there is no difference. They asked, they got half an answer, and somebody else finished the conversation.

Why it is worse than it looks

Two things stack up. The first is that the people who give up quietly are not a random sample. Somebody with a small job and no urgency will wait. Somebody with a big job and a deadline will not, because they have already messaged the next two names on the list. The enquiries you lose to silence are, on average, the better ones.

The second is that none of it appears anywhere. You cannot look at a report and see six months of this. You can only ever see the work that did arrive. What I know about missing enquiries I know because I missed them, not occasionally but regularly, for years, while being perfectly confident I was on top of it.

What to do about it this week

None of this needs software to start with. Four of the six above can be closed by Thursday with nothing but a decision.

1. Send yourself an enquiry through every route you have, from outside the business, and log what happens and when. This is the whole diagnosis in one afternoon.
2. Give every route an owner and a frequency. Not a rota. One name, one number of times a day. Routes with no owner get switched off rather than left open.
3. Agree a holding reply and use it without guilt. Something that says you have got it, says when a real answer will come, and asks the one question you always end up asking anyway. A reply in ten minutes that promises Thursday beats a perfect quote on Friday.
4. Write down the ten things you quote most and roughly what they come to. Half of the pricing that holds a reply up is pricing you have already done a dozen times and have not written anywhere.
5. Keep one list of everyone who went quiet and go down it once a week. It can be a notebook. It cannot be your memory.

Do those and the remaining problem is the genuinely hard one, which is the hours between six in the evening and eight in the morning, and the Sundays, and the weeks you are on a job that needs your full attention. That is the part that needs something answering for you, and it is the part we build.