The Enquiries Your Business Lost Last Year

The enquiries nobody saw

Every business loses some enquiries. A call comes in while everyone is busy, the caller does not leave a message, and they ring the next business on the list.

Most of these losses leave no trace. Nobody sees the call that rang out on a Saturday, or the form that went to an inbox nobody opens.

So plans for a new year usually start with getting more: more visitors, more advertising, a new page. The leaks stay where they are.

Today, the year's first working day, is a sensible time to look for them. Last year's records are complete, and the busy season is still ahead.

Where enquiries leak

• Calls that ring out after hours, at lunch, or while everyone is on site.
• A voicemail box that is full, so callers cannot leave anything.
• A website form that stopped sending, often months before anyone noticed.
• Quotes sent and never chased, because nobody owned the follow-up.
• Replies sitting in a spam folder that nobody opens.

The third is the quietest. A broken form looks exactly like a slow month, and the site keeps offering it to every visitor who wants to get in touch.

Call your own number

Ring the main number from a mobile at opening time, at lunch and after closing. Listen the way a customer would.

Count the rings before anything answers. Then listen to the greeting: whether it gives the right hours, and a quicker way to reach you than waiting for a call back.

Then try to leave a message. A box that filled up during a busy month turns away every later caller, and few of them try twice.

Check the call log on the phone system or the mobile as well. A number that rang and left no message may well belong to someone who called a competitor next.

Send yourself an enquiry

Fill in the contact form on your own website, from a phone, as a customer would. Note whether it arrives, in which inbox, and how long it takes.

Forms break quietly. A plugin update, a move to a new host or a staff member leaving whose address the form still uses can stop delivery, and the visitor still sees the thank-you message.

If Analytics counts visits to the thank-you page, compare last year's total with the number of form emails that actually arrived. A clear gap between those two figures usually means enquiries that went nowhere.

Search the spam folders

Form notifications are a common casualty of spam filters. Many forms send them as though they came from the visitor's own address, which to a mail server looks like forgery.

Customers' replies land there too: an answer to a quote, a question about timing, a photograph of the job.

Search the spam or junk folder of every inbox that receives enquiries, as far back as it goes. Mark anything genuine as not spam so the filter learns.

Then ask whoever looks after the site to have form emails sent from an address on your domain, with the visitor's address as the reply-to, so that pressing reply still reaches them.

Quotes that went quiet

A quote with no reply is not a refusal. People get busy, compare prices, mean to call back and forget.

Go through last year's quotes, from the accounting software or the sent folder, and mark each one won, lost or no answer.

The no-answer pile is often the biggest, and it is the cheapest work available this year. A short, polite note asking whether the job is still planned is often welcome.

From now on, give every quote a follow-up date on the day it goes out, with one person's name beside it.

A worked example

A personal chef cooks weekly meals in clients' kitchens and caters dinner parties of eight to twenty, working alone or with one helper on larger evenings.

Most enquiries came by phone, and most calls arrived between four and eight in the evening, while she was cooking with her hands full. By midweek in December her voicemail box was full.

Her website form still sent to the email address she used when she started out, which she now opened about once a month.

Quotes for dinner parties went out by email, and anyone who did not answer never heard from her again.

The fix took an afternoon. The form now sends to her main inbox and gets a test on the first of each month, and her greeting promises a call back by ten the next morning.

Every quote goes into a list with a follow-up date a week out. None of it brought a single extra visitor to the site; it made sure the people already trying to reach her could.

Routes nobody owns

Enquiries also arrive by routes nobody thinks of as routes: messages on the Facebook page, the email address printed on old business cards, the general inbox, a second phone line.

Each one needs a named person who checks it on a set schedule. A route with no owner is a route that loses enquiries.

If a route is not worth watching, close it properly, or forward it to an inbox someone reads.

Leaks before traffic

Every visitor you pay for meets the same phone, the same form and the same follow-up as everyone else.

Whatever share of enquiries the leaks are losing, they will lose the same share of the paid ones. More advertising pointed at a broken form only buys more broken enquiries.

Fixing a leak usually costs an afternoon, once. Advertising costs money every day it runs, which is why the order matters.

The counter-case

Some businesses will find little. A shop where nearly every sale happens at the counter loses fewer enquiries this way.

And some leaks cannot be closed completely. A one-person business cannot answer the phone in the middle of a job, and an honest greeting with a firm call-back time may be the best available.

Even so, the check takes about an hour, and the form test alone is worth repeating monthly. Find the leaks first, then decide how much to spend on bringing more people in.

Before any new campaign

1. Call your own number after closing time.
2. Empty the voicemail box and update the greeting.
3. Send a test enquiry through every form.
4. Search the spam folders of every enquiry inbox.
5. List last year's quotes and mark the silent ones.
6. Name one person for each enquiry route.
7. Put a monthly form test in the calendar.

Step three is today's job. A form that has stopped sending loses every enquiry it receives, without a sound, until someone tests it.

An hour spent this week is cheaper than any campaign, and everything else planned for the website this year depends on it.

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.