Handling Twice the Enquiries for Six Weeks

You cannot hire for six weeks

The constraint that shapes everything else.

Recruiting, training, and getting somebody useful takes longer than the surge lasts, and by the time they are effective the volume has gone.

Temporary help can answer a phone and cannot answer questions about your work, which means the specific enquiries still reach the same person.

So the response is to change what arrives, what gets answered first, and how long each answer takes, rather than to add capacity.

All three of those are decided in November, which is the point of writing this now.

Remove the questions first

The highest-return action and the one that reduces volume rather than managing it.

Look at the last thirty enquiries and count how many are the same four or five questions.

For most businesses it is a large majority: when will it arrive, do you have it, how much, do you cover my area, are you open.

Each of those can be answered on the site, prominently, so the enquiry never arrives.

A delivery date on the product page removes the where-is-my-order question. Prices remove the how-much question. Coverage removes the do-you-come-here question.

Businesses regularly reduce enquiry volume by a third with an afternoon of this, and every removed enquiry is one nobody has to answer for six weeks.

Decide the order of priority

• Problems with existing orders, first, always.
• Ready-to-buy enquiries with a deadline attached.
• Quotable work for the new year.
• General questions already answered on the site.
• Anything speculative or clearly out of scope.

The first is not commercial instinct and it is correct: an existing customer with a problem is the one who will write a review, and the one whose situation gets worse by the hour.

Write the standard replies now

The preparation that saves the most time per hour spent.

Six or seven short replies covering the repeating situations: the delivery timing answer, the out-of-stock answer, the we-cannot-take-it-before-January answer, the price-range answer, and the your-order-is-delayed answer.

Each written properly once, in November, rather than badly forty times in December.

They should sound like a person and leave a gap for one specific sentence, since a reply that is entirely template reads as one.

Put them somewhere everybody can reach, and tell whoever is answering that using them is expected rather than lazy.

Publish a response time you can meet

The commitment that converts frustration into a wait.

Somebody who has heard nothing for two days assumes they have been ignored. Somebody told to expect a reply within two working days waits calmly for two working days.

State it on the contact page, in the automatic acknowledgement, and beside the form.

Make it one you can meet in the worst week rather than the best, because a stated time that is missed is worse than a longer one that is kept.

And say what to do if it is urgent, which gives the small number of genuinely urgent people a faster route and keeps them out of the general queue.

A worked example

A business received roughly double their normal enquiries through December and handled it by working later, which produced slow replies and two poor reviews.

The following year they prepared in November.

They read the previous December's enquiries and found four questions accounted for most of them, all of which they answered on the site.

They wrote seven standard replies, published a two-working-day response time, and agreed that order problems were answered first regardless of anything else.

Volume was similar. Enquiries needing an individual answer fell by about a third, replies went out faster, and there were no complaints about response times.

The owner's assessment was that the preparation had taken one afternoon and had saved most of a month of evenings.

Batch the answering

A working practice that produces more than it sounds like.

Answering enquiries as they arrive means constant interruption, and each interruption costs more than the reply.

Three fixed slots a day, with the inbox closed between them, gets through more in less time and keeps the rest of the work moving.

The acknowledgement covers the gap, since somebody who knows a reply is coming within two days does not need one within ten minutes.

Keep one exception: order problems get looked at whenever they arrive, which is a small number and the ones that matter.

Say no early and clearly

The part that protects the rest.

Some enquiries cannot be served in the period, and a quick honest no is better for both parties than a slow maybe.

Tell them plainly, give a date when you could help, and offer to contact them then.

That converts a decline into a January booking surprisingly often, and it removes the enquiry from the queue immediately rather than leaving it to be reconsidered three times.

The slow maybe is the expensive option: it consumes attention repeatedly, and it still ends in a no delivered later and worse.

The counter-case

Triage assumes the volume is genuinely more than you can serve, which is worth checking.

A business struggling with twice the enquiries may be struggling with the process rather than the volume, and a slow quoting system or a cumbersome form will fail at any level.

There is also a risk in over-systematising a small operation: template replies and fixed slots applied to fifteen enquiries a week make a personal business feel like a call centre, which is a real loss.

And for some businesses the surge is the year's opportunity, where the right answer is genuinely to work harder for six weeks rather than to filter.

Prepare the replies and the priorities either way, and use them only to the extent the volume requires.

The November afternoon

1. Read the last thirty enquiries and count the repeats.
2. Answer those questions on the site.
3. Agree the priority order, problems first.
4. Write six or seven standard replies.
5. Publish a response time you can meet at your worst.
6. Give an urgent route for the few who need it.
7. Set three answering slots a day.

Step two is the only item that reduces the volume rather than managing it, which makes it worth more than the other six.

Managing demand against capacity is covered in turning advertising off in a busy month.

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.