Usually it is when they are answered rather than how. An enquiry that arrives at nine in the evening and is read at nine the next morning has spent twelve hours sitting with a business that answered sooner. The other half is the follow-up nobody makes: most people go quiet once, and the business that asks a second time is often the one that gets the work. Neither problem is fixed by rewriting the website.
Getting found is the slow, expensive half of this. Answering what it brings in is the fast, cheap half, and it is the half that decides whether the first one paid for itself.
Almost everybody asking this assumes the problem is the enquiries: wrong people, tyre-kickers, bad leads. Sometimes true. More often the enquiries were fine and the reply was late, or there was only one of them.
How long is an enquiry actually waiting?
Nobody knows this about their own business until they count it, and the guess is always kinder than the number. Take last month, list every enquiry, and write down two times against each: when it arrived and when a real answer went back.
The average will be dragged upwards by evenings, weekends and the days somebody was on site. Those are not the exception in most trades. They are when customers have time to look for you.
- Time to first real reply
- Median, not average. One bad week hides in an average
- Arrived outside working hours
- As a share of the month
- Never chased a second time
- Count them. It is usually most of them
- Places an enquiry can arrive
- Form, WhatsApp, phone, email, Instagram, walk-in
Where do the enquiries even arrive?
The last line above is the one that surprises people. Work arrives in five or six places, each watched by a different person with a different idea of whose job it is, and the ones that go missing are almost always in the channel nobody owns.
It also has to be possible to reach you at all from a phone. Of the Gulf business sites we measured for the GCC Business Website Index, 54.9% had a tappable phone or WhatsApp link. In cafés it was 31.5%. Everybody else is asking a customer to copy a number by hand.
What does an instant reply have to contain?
"Thanks for your enquiry, we will get back to you shortly" is a receipt, not an answer. It buys nothing, because the customer messaged three businesses and is waiting for whichever one tells them something.
A reply worth sending in the first minute has three things in it: an actual answer to what was asked, either the price or the two facts that decide the price, and one next step that can be taken immediately. If a booking link is that step, the reply has done the whole job by itself.
It also has to be in the language the enquiry was written in. In this market that means Arabic and English, often mixed inside one message, and a reply that only really works in one of them reads as a form letter.
Who chases the ones that went quiet?
Usually nobody, and everybody knows it. Following up is unpleasant, it is nobody’s named job, and by the time anyone remembers, enough days have passed that the message would be awkward.
This is the single most valuable thing to hand to a system, because a system finds it neither awkward nor tedious. Two messages spread over a fortnight, stopping the moment somebody replies or says no, is enough to change the shape of a month.
What can be handed to a system, and what should not be?
The work that happens the same way every time is what goes first.
- Reading every enquiry wherever it lands, classifying it and routing it to whoever handles it
- Answering in seconds, in Arabic or English, with a real answer and a price where there is one
- Booking into the calendar the business already uses
- Chasing whoever went quiet, for as long as it is worth chasing them
- Building and sending quotes and invoices, then following up on the unpaid ones
- A weekly summary of what arrived, what was answered and what was lost
What should not go first: complaints, anything about money that is in dispute, and any case where being wrong is expensive. Those stay with a person. On day one none of it sends by itself anyway. Every reply waits for somebody to approve it, you watch it for a few weeks, and then you decide which cases are safe to release and which always wait for a human. You choose where that line sits and you can move it later.
Does fixing this need a new website?
Often not. If your site sends readable text, states what you do, and gives somebody a way to reach you from a phone, the automation can be built onto what you already have and onto the accounts you already pay for.
A new site is worth it when there is nowhere for the enquiry to arrive through, or when the pages are invisible to search in the first place, in which case there are no enquiries to lose yet. That is the order we work in: the automation is the product, and the website is built when the automation has nothing to arrive through.
Questions people actually ask
- How fast is fast enough to reply?
- Minutes rather than hours, and the same at midnight as at midday. The value is not really speed, it is being first: a customer who has messaged three businesses stops looking once one of them answers usefully.
- Will customers know they are talking to an automated system?
- Some will, and it matters less than people expect when the answer is genuinely useful and arrives immediately. What customers object to is a bot that cannot answer and will not hand over. Keep a clear route to a person and say what that route is.
- Can this work if my enquiries come through WhatsApp rather than a form?
- Yes, and in this market that is the usual case. WhatsApp is where most enquiries arrive, so it is the first channel we connect rather than an afterthought.
- What if the automation answers somebody badly?
- It is the reason nothing sends by itself at first. Replies are drafted and held for approval while you watch what it would have said, and only the cases you are satisfied with get released. Complaints and money can stay with a person permanently.