Nothing goes cold because nobody saw it.
Enquiries arrive by telephone, by email, through the website and sometimes through a form nobody checks. Whether one gets followed up depends on who happened to see it, and the owner ends up as the backstop for anything that has gone quiet.
You might recognise some of this.
If three or four of these are true, this is the page for you. If none of them are, it probably is not, and we would rather you knew that now.
- New enquiries land in two or three places, and no single list has all of them
- Whether somebody is chased depends on who took the call and how busy they were
- An enquiry that arrives out of hours waits until somebody notices it
- Nobody can say how many enquiries came in last month without counting by hand
- You are the person who remembers the one that has gone quiet
One made up example, before and after.
This is an illustration, not a client. Northridge Systems is a new practice and there are no case studies on this site. The example below is invented to show the shape of the problem and the shape of the fix. Nothing in it describes a real business or a real result.
A Tuesday now
- A viewing enquiry arrives through the website at 17:40 and lands in a shared inbox.
- Someone reads it on their phone that evening, means to deal with it, and does not.
- It is still unread on Thursday, under nineteen other messages.
- The enquirer rings a competitor on Friday.
- Nobody ever knows it happened, because nothing recorded it.
A Tuesday after
- The same enquiry lands in one list, whichever way it came in, with the time it arrived.
- Whoever is on the desk sees it on the same screen as the telephone enquiries.
- Nothing is marked done until somebody says it is, and anything untouched after a day is on the list at the top.
- A person decides what to say and sends it. The system only decides what is still waiting.
- At the end of the month you can see how many came in, and how many were answered the same day.
What is actually handed over.
Written down before the work starts, as part of the quote, so there is no argument later about what was included.
- One place that holds every enquiry, whichever way it arrived
- A rule for what counts as followed up, agreed with you rather than assumed
- Something that shows what is still waiting, in the order it should be dealt with
- A weekly count of enquiries in and enquiries answered, from your own records
- The notes, the logins and the reasoning, so this is not ours to hold
Decisions stay with people.
Software is good at remembering and terrible at judgement. Where AI is genuinely useful we use it, and it drafts rather than decides: nothing reaches a customer without somebody looking at it first.
- Who gets replied to, and in what order
- What is actually said to a customer, always. Nothing is sent without a person
- Whether an enquiry is worth pursuing at all
- Who is allowed to see the list, and who is not
The next step is a conversation about this one thing.
Tell us where enquiries reach you now, and we will go through one of them end to end. It runs to 45 minutes and there is nothing to prepare. Within two working days you get one page: what we heard, what we would change first and what it would involve, yours to keep whether or not you use us.