The numbers on the account were good: cost per lead down, form fills up. The revenue was not moving. We asked to be shown what happens to an enquiry after it arrives, and the answer was an email to an address that one person in the office checked when they remembered.
What was actually broken
- Nine fields on a form asking for information nobody needs before a phone call.
- Email-only routing, to an inbox that lives on a desktop.
- No named owner, so “someone will pick it up” meant everyone assumed someone else had.
- No record of which campaign produced the enquiry that turned into work – only which produced the click.
The changes, in order of effect
Cut the fields. Name, phone, what you need. Everything else is a question for the call, and every extra field is a small tax on mobile completion. In this market the phone number is the field that matters; email is the one people get wrong.
Route it to something that rings. A WhatsApp deep link with the enquiry text prefilled, plus a push to the handset of the person on duty. Not a shared inbox.
Name an owner and a target. We work to a four-minute first response during business hours, Monday to Saturday, 10:00 to 18:00. Not because four is magic, but because an unowned queue drifts to hours and a number on a wall does not.
Set the expectation in the auto-reply. “We will call you from this number today between 10 and 6” converts a cold callback into an expected one, and stops the same person filling the form twice because they thought it failed.
Close the loop on quality. Every enquiry gets a stage – reached, qualified, quoted, won, dead – and the campaign that produced it is recorded with it. Two weeks of that data changes the account more than a month of optimisation, because you stop buying the campaign that produces volume and start buying the one that produces work.
What to check on your own site this week
Send yourself an enquiry at eleven in the morning and again at four. Time the response. If the gap between the two answers is more than a few minutes, the leak is in the rota, and no amount of landing-page work will fix it.
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