From form to inbox: what should happen when someone sends an enquiry

Someone found your site, read it, made up their mind and pressed send. It is the best thing that can happen on a website. Yet this is where most sites are at their weakest: the enquiry lands in a mailbox that gets emptied when someone has time, and the customer is left wondering whether it even went through.

The customer is comparing while you are not looking

Whoever sends an enquiry has usually sent another one, or is about to. As long as the reply is pending, the customer is still on the way somewhere else. The company that answers first has an advantage that has nothing to do with price or quality, only with being there while the customer still had the phone in their hand.

A reply that arrives straight away does not need to solve anything. It needs to confirm that the enquiry is in, say what happens next and when. The rest can wait until then.

Three things that should happen at once

This is how I set up the form on the sites I build. None of it requires the customer or you to do anything extra.

1. You get the email with everything the customer wrote. Name, contact details and what it is about, as an ordinary email in your inbox. Press reply and your answer goes straight to the customer, because the sender is set to their address. No login, no dashboard, no system to open.
2. A colleague can get a copy. In a company where one person has the phone and another sits at the computer, the enquiry should reach both. The copy means whoever gets there first takes it, and nobody assumes someone else already did.
3. The customer gets a reply at once. An email from you, in your tone, that says thank you, explains how things proceed and when you will be in touch. That is the email that makes the customer stop looking.

Write the reply the way you would say it

The auto-reply is the first thing the customer reads from you, so it should not sound like a system. Three short paragraphs are enough:

Hi Anna, thank you for your enquiry.

I will read it as soon as I can, by tomorrow at the latest, and get back to you on the number you left. If it is urgent, you are welcome to call me directly on 070-000 00 00.

Best regards, John at the Company

Skip "we will get back to you as soon as possible". It promises nothing. Say what applies: today, tomorrow or on Monday. And only promise what you keep, because the second email the customer remembers is the one that turned out to be wrong.

What you can skip

A small company rarely needs a customer system for its enquiries. The inbox is the system, until there are more than you can answer. The point of the flow above is that nothing should live anywhere other than where you already look every day, and that the customer should have an answer before you have even opened the email.

What should not happen matters just as much: no newsletters because someone asked about a price, no follow-up emails the customer never asked for. An enquiry is a question that deserves an answer, nothing more.

The same idea on the phone

The form is one of two ways in. The other is the phone, and the same thing happens there when nobody answers: the customer calls the next number. A text on a missed call does for the phone what the auto-reply does for the form, and the missed-call replies service is included in the Startpaket together with the website.

If you want to see what it looks like in practice, send an enquiry through the form on this site. You will get the reply straight away.