When new enquiries sit for a day, the cause is rarely laziness. Everyone assumes someone else saw the form email, the missed call goes unreturned until the evening, and by then the customer has already booked whoever answered first. The fix is small: one named person on duty for new leads, a reply target you can keep every day, a first reply that moves things forward, and a written rule for evenings and weekends.
Put one person on duty
"The team answers enquiries" means nobody in particular does. Split the week into shifts and give each shift one owner. For a team of three, a half-day schedule is enough:
| Morning | Afternoon | |
|---|---|---|
| Mon, Wed, Fri | Sam | Priya |
| Tue, Thu | Priya | Dan |
The person on duty answers every new enquiry that arrives in their shift, whatever the channel: web form, email, missed call, message. They do not have to sell the job. Their task is the first reply and getting the lead to the right person with a clear next step.
Two details make the schedule work:
- A backup. If the person on duty is on a site visit or in a meeting, the backup covers. Write the backup into the schedule rather than leaving it to goodwill.
- One place where new enquiries land. If form emails go to one inbox, calls to a cell phone and messages to another app, the person on duty cannot see everything. Forward all of them to one shared inbox or one list, even if it is a spreadsheet tab.
Set a reply target you can keep
Pick a target for working hours and stick to it every day. A realistic default for a small team: missed calls returned within 30 minutes, forms and emails answered within an hour. A target you hit on Monday and miss by Wednesday is worse than a slower one you always meet, because you will stop measuring it.
Speed matters most for jobs where the customer is asking several businesses at once, such as emergency repairs, moving jobs or anything with a date attached. For a large project the customer is comparing over weeks, a same-day reply is fine as long as it says something useful.
What the first reply says
The first reply is not the quote. It has three jobs: show that a person read the enquiry, answer or ask one thing, and offer a concrete next step. A simple shape:
Hi Laura, thanks for the details about the kitchen range hood. We can do this, and we have done several in older apartments like yours. One question: is the duct going through an outside wall or up into the attic? If you can send a photo of where it would go, I can give you a price range today. Or I can call you at 4:30 if that is easier.
Compare that with "Thank you for your enquiry, a member of our team will be in touch." The second version tells the customer nothing and gives them no reason to wait for you.
Keep three or four of these as templates for your common job types, so the person on duty edits a few words instead of writing from scratch.
Evenings and weekends
Decide in advance what happens outside working hours, and say it to the customer:
- An automatic acknowledgment on forms and email that gives a real time: "We reply to enquiries from 8:00 on weekdays. Messages sent on the weekend are answered on Monday morning." Do not promise "as soon as possible".
- A first job each working morning: the person on the morning shift clears overnight enquiries before anything else.
- An optional weekend check. If your work is urgent by nature, one person checks once on Saturday and Sunday morning, taking turns. If it is not, skip it and let the acknowledgment do its job.
Replying at midnight from your phone is your choice, but it should not be the system. If replies depend on someone checking email in bed, the routine breaks the first week that person is on vacation.
Check it once a week
Add three columns to wherever you log enquiries:
| Received | First reply | Replied by |
|---|
Once a week, look at the enquiries where the gap was longer than your target and ask why. Typical answers are fixable: the form email went to spam, the person on duty was on a job with no backup, or the enquiry came through a channel nobody watches. Fix the cause, not the person.
You probably do not need any software for this while you get fewer than a handful of enquiries a day. A shared inbox plus a schedule on the wall covers it.
Where a CRM helps
Software helps once enquiries arrive from several channels and the person on duty changes during the day. A CRM can put every new lead in one list, assign it to someone and create a reminder with a due time, so a lead that nobody touched shows up as overdue instead of disappearing.
In Pipedrive, new enquiries can land in the Leads Inbox with an owner. A workflow automation can react to a new lead by creating an activity, such as "call back" due the same day; automations are on the Growth plan and higher. Rotating new leads between team members uses automatic assignment, which needs Premium or Ultimate according to Pipedrive's plan comparison. Pipedrive's documentation lists an inactive user as a reason an assignment fails, so the schedule and the backup still need a human owner. The tool reminds; it does not reply.