Four places to check before you know who wants a move
Enquiries come in through the website form, the lead service that sends you an email, the other lead service with its own login, the phone, and the odd Facebook message. The office checks each of them in between calls and crew problems.
By the time someone rings a lead back, it has been a couple of hours. The customer says they have already had someone out, or they are booked in with another firm for tomorrow. A lead service charge was paid for a customer who was gone before you knew they existed.
Why the reply is slow even when the team is quick
Your staff are not slow. The enquiries are scattered, and each one arrives in a slightly different format, so every lead needs reading, checking and retyping before anybody can act on it.
- Each lead source has its own email layout or portal.
- The office is also handling crews, customers on the day and storage calls.
- Booking a survey needs a check of the surveyor's diary first.
- Evening and weekend enquiries wait until the next working morning.
What the delay costs
Paid leads are the obvious loss: money spent on a customer you never spoke to. Website enquiries are cheaper but lost the same way. Harder to see is the effect on your surveyors, whose diaries fill with jobs that were already half decided elsewhere.
Over time you may also conclude that a lead source does not work, when the real reason was response time.
How we get a reply out while the customer is still looking
- We read enquiries from every source you use: website form, the notification emails your lead services send, and their APIs where they offer one.
- Each enquiry is turned into the same record: name, contact details, from and to addresses, property size, rough move date and source.
- The customer gets an immediate reply in your wording, with a link to pick a survey or video survey slot from the surveyors' real availability.
- The duty person gets an alert with the key details on screen and a one-tap call link.
- Duplicates, such as the same customer arriving from two sources, are merged rather than called twice.
- Every record keeps its source, so you can see which lead services turn into booked moves.
| Source | Today | After |
|---|---|---|
| Website form | Email to a shared inbox | Record plus instant reply |
| Lead service email | Read and retyped | Parsed into the same record |
| Evening enquiry | Next morning | Reply and survey link that night |
| Phone | Notes on paper | Logged in the same queue |
Nothing about this pretends to be a person. The instant reply is clearly from your firm and makes it easy to book, which is what most customers want at that moment.
What your mornings look like
Overnight enquiries have already had a reply, and some have booked their survey slot. The rest are in one queue in order of move date. Staff spend their time on conversations, not on copying addresses between screens.
At the end of the month you can see, by source, how many enquiries became surveys and how many became moves.
Is your enquiry handling costing you moves?
- Enquiries arrive in more than two places.
- Evening and weekend leads wait until the next working day.
- Customers say they have already booked with someone else.
- You are unsure which lead service is worth the money.
- Survey bookings need a phone call to check the diary.