How much for a charger?
That is the whole message. It came through the contact form on Saturday, along with thirty others after a car dealer mentioned your name. Monday morning, someone starts ringing. Half do not answer. Of those who do, some park on the street, some rent and have not asked the landlord, some live in a flat with a car park they do not control, and some have not bought the car yet.
By Wednesday the good enquiries, the ones with a driveway and a car on order, have had quotes from two other installers who happened to ring first.
A contact form built for a different business
The website form was made for general enquiries: name, email, phone, message. Charger work depends on a handful of facts that decide everything else, and none of them are asked. Staff try to fill the gap by phone, which works for the enquiries you reach and fails for the ones you do not.
- No question about off-street parking or who owns the parking space.
- No question about owning the property, or landlord or freeholder permission.
- No idea where the board is relative to where the car parks.
- Nothing to show whether a grant might apply, so the conversation starts from scratch.
- Leads from partners, dealers and the website land in different inboxes.
The cost of calling everyone
The office spends its best hours on enquiries that cannot go ahead, while ready buyers wait. Response time to good leads suffers, which is when you lose them. Some people get a quote that assumed a driveway they do not have. And because nobody records why an enquiry went nowhere, you cannot tell whether your marketing is bringing in homeowners with drives or renters on terraced streets.
The intake we set up
- We replace the generic form with a short branching one: parking type, property ownership or permission, house or flat, rough distance from board to parking spot, vehicle status, and postcode. Each question is one tap on a phone.
- Answers that suggest a grant might apply show a short note saying you will check eligibility, without promising anything.
- Enquiries arriving by email or from partner referrals are read by an AI model (OpenAI or Anthropic Claude) that pulls out the same fields where they are present and lists what is missing.
- Every enquiry is sorted: ready for the survey photo request, needs a call (with the specific question to ask), or outside what you do. Your rules decide the sorting, and a person can override it.
- Ready enquiries get the next step immediately, such as the photo request link or a choice of call times. Out-of-scope ones get a polite reply, and the reason is recorded.
- Everything lands in one queue in your CRM or job system, such as HubSpot or the enquiry screen you already use.
| Enquiry type | What happens now | What happens with the intake |
|---|---|---|
| Driveway, owns home, car ordered | Waits in the call list | Photo request sent straight away |
| Flat with shared car park | Long call to find out | Routed to the right person with the question listed |
| On-street parking only | Called, then declined | Polite reply, reason recorded |
| Partner referral by email | Retyped into the CRM | Fields extracted, missing ones flagged |
A morning spent on the right calls
The call list shrinks to the enquiries that need a human, each with the question already written down. Good leads get their next step while they are still comparing installers. Monthly, you can see where enquiries come from and how many were suitable, which tells you more about your marketing than the total count ever did.
Signs your enquiry handling needs this
- Most first calls are spent asking the same four questions.
- You have quoted jobs that turned out to have no off-street parking.
- Busy weekends leave a backlog nobody clears until midweek.
- Partner and dealer leads arrive in a different inbox from web leads.
- You cannot say what share of enquiries were a fit last month.