A Site Whose Contact Form Goes to a Former Employee

The site

A notary public office in a town centre, with two notaries and four staff: home purchases and sales, wills, powers of attorney, affidavits and travel consent letters.

The site is tidy and current, with a page for each service, the team, fees for common documents, and a contact form on every page asking what is needed and by when.

On sending, a green message appears: thank you, we will be in touch within one business day.

For the past year, every one of those messages has gone to the inbox of an office assistant who left last November.

Her mailbox was kept open in case clients wrote to her. Nobody logs in to it.

The inference a visitor makes

Someone buying a home, updating a will or travelling with a child needs a notary, often by a date. They fill in the form, read the thank you, and wait.

When a day passes, then three, they do not conclude that the form is misconfigured. Nobody thinks that. They conclude the office is too busy, not interested in small jobs, or careless.

Most do not write again. They phone the next notary on the list, and the first office never learns they existed.

The few who do phone are told that nothing arrived. It sounds like an excuse, because the website told them it had.

Where the address is set

• The form plugin's settings, separate from every staff list.
• Notification rules, sometimes several for one form.
• Quote or booking tools run by an outside service.
• A theme's built-in form, configured once at launch.
• Forwarding rules on the mail server.
• The site's admin email, used as a fallback.

The first is why nobody remembered it. When someone leaves, the business takes them off the payroll and changes the alarm code. Nobody thinks of a box inside a plugin, unopened since the site was built.

A thank you that proves nothing

The confirmation message is the most misleading part of the page.

It appears once the website has handed the message to its mail system. It cannot know where the message goes next, whether it arrives, or whether a person ever reads it.

So the site behaves perfectly. Any test that looked only at the screen, and not at an inbox, would have passed.

An open mailbox is worse than a closed one

Had the assistant's mailbox been deleted, the messages would at least have failed somewhere, in bounce notices someone might eventually have seen.

A mailbox kept open accepts everything and complains about nothing. It holds every enquiry safely and unread, and on most business email plans it costs a monthly licence as well.

Keeping a departed employee's mailbox for a few weeks can be sensible. What it needs is a person: forwarding to a colleague, or someone named to check it, and a date to close it.

No copy anywhere else

The office's form plugin sent each enquiry by email and kept nothing on the site. With the email unread, there was no second place to find it.

A stored copy of each submission, kept on the site for a short, set period, is the safety net for exactly this.

Anyone glancing at the entries screen would have seen enquiries arriving that nobody had answered.

Stored entries are personal information, so give them a retention period and delete them on schedule.

A promise that makes silence worse

Within one business day is a good thing to promise. It tells the visitor when to expect an answer, and stops them sending the same message three times.

It also starts a clock. When the day passes without a reply, the promise turns a delay into a broken commitment, made in the office's own words.

The fix is not a vaguer promise. It is making sure someone is there to keep it.

A worked example

It came to light in October. A realtor who had sent buyers to the office for years phoned to ask why two of them had heard nothing back about their completion dates.

The office manager sent a test from her own email, and it never arrived. Whoever maintained the website found the form sending to the assistant's address, set when the site launched two years earlier.

The old mailbox held a year of enquiries, some from people who had written twice. The office replied to each with an apology, knowing many of those dates had long passed.

The form now sends to a shared enquiries address read by two people, keeps a copy on the site for ninety days, and is tested from an outside address on the first of each month.

And the form's recipient is now on the checklist for anyone leaving the office.

The checks that catch it

The first is a monthly test from an outside address, such as a personal email account, with the word test in the message. Confirm it reached the shared inbox within minutes, and not the spam folder.

The second is a glance at enquiry numbers each month. A form that goes from steady to nothing has not lost its audience overnight.

The third is a question for every new client: how did you find us. If nobody ever says the website, find out why.

The counter-case within the site

An office that wins most of its work through realtors, lawyers and repeat clients may see few form enquiries, so the loss is smaller.

The form is still a door on every page, with a promise beside it.

Forwarding the old mailbox to one of the notaries would also have caught these messages. It works, but it ties the form to one person's inbox again, which is how this started.

Outside booking or quote tools have notification settings of their own, to be checked separately. Whatever the volume, the form should reach a shared address, keep a copy, and be tested every month.

What to change

1. Send a test enquiry from an outside address today.
2. Find every form's recipient setting.
3. Point them at a shared address two people read.
4. Keep a copy of each enquiry for a set period.
5. Read the old mailbox and reply to what you find.
6. Add form recipients to the leaving checklist.
7. Repeat the test on the first of each month.

Step six is the one that stops it happening again. Staff will leave and the form will outlast several of them; the checklist is where the next departure gets caught.

The wider list of accounts tied to one person is in every login your website depends on.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.