Library / Customer questions
Stop answering the same five questions
Every small business answers the same handful of questions forever. Here is how to find yours from the evidence rather than memory, answer each one properly once, and put those answers where they work while you sleep.
Every small business on earth answers the same small set of questions forever. Where are you. What does it cost. How soon can you come. Do you take my insurance. Is it ready yet. What do I need to bring.
Answering them is not the problem. Answering them from scratch, in a hurry, at ten at night, for the four hundredth time is the problem, and the cost is not really the minutes. It is that the fifth answer of the day is worse than the first, and the one you type in the van is worse than both.
Find your five, properly
Do not do this from memory. Memory gives you the questions that irritate you, not the ones that actually come in most.
Open your sent folder and read back the last forty replies you have written to customers. Forty is enough. For each one, write a single line saying what the person was really asking. Then group the lines.
Almost every business that does this finds the same thing: somewhere between five and eight questions account for the large majority of everything they answer. People are consistently surprised by which ones come top. It is rarely price.
If you take phone calls more than email, do the same exercise with a notepad next to the phone for three days. Tick a line every time a question repeats. Three days is plenty.
Answer each one properly, once
Now write the real answer to each question. Not a template with blanks. The actual answer, the way you would say it to a good customer on a good day, when you had time.
Include the things you usually leave out when you are rushing: the caveat, the thing people always ask next, the reason behind the policy. A proper answer to how soon can you come out includes what makes it faster, what makes it slower, and what you need from them.
This is the part that gets skipped, and it is the part that matters. What you are building is not a list of canned responses. It is the best version of your answers, written once while you were calm.
The dictation shortcut
If writing feels like homework, do not write. Open the voice recorder on your phone, and talk through each answer as if a customer were in front of you. Then hand the recording to an assistant and ask it to tidy the transcript into clear written answers without changing your meaning.
You will get better answers this way than by typing, because you already know how to say this. It is putting it in writing that feels like work.
Put the answers where they do work
Written answers sitting in a document help nobody. There are four places they earn their keep, in increasing order of effort.
One: on your website, in plain sight
The cheapest possible win and the one most businesses skip. A real answers page, written in your voice, cuts the number of questions that ever reach you and quietly does your marketing at the same time. People can tell the difference between a business that answers properly and one that hides behind a form.
Two: as saved replies in your email
Every mail program has this feature under some name or other. Paste each answer in as a reusable reply. Now answering takes ten seconds and the answer is the good version, not the tired version.
Three: as the brief for your assistant
Keep all the answers in one document. When a message comes in that is close to one of them but not identical, paste the document plus the customer's message and ask for a reply drawing only on what is in the document. You read it, adjust it, send it. This is the highest-value habit in this entire guide and it takes no setup at all.
Four: as an automatic reply after hours
Only once the first three are working. And a warning worth taking seriously: an automatic responder that answers confidently and wrongly does far more damage than one that says we have got this, you will hear from a person in the morning, and here are the answers to the things people usually ask. Start with the honest version.
Keeping it alive
This rots. Prices change, a policy changes, you stop offering something. A document full of confidently wrong answers is worse than no document.
The fix is one recurring reminder, once a quarter, to read the whole thing top to bottom. It takes twenty minutes. Put it in the calendar now, before you write a single answer, because the version of you that is excited about this today is not the version who has to maintain it in March.
What to actually expect
Not silence. You will still get questions, and you want to. A customer asking a question is a customer who is interested.
What changes is that the repetitive ones stop reaching you, and the ones that do reach you get a good answer in a tenth of the time. Owners who do this properly describe the same two things: the evening backlog gets noticeably shorter, and they stop dreading the inbox. That is the win. It is not a small one.
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The assessment is the same thinking, applied to your actual business, written down and handed over in five days.