Customer enquiries wait days for a reply? What it costs you, and how to answer in minutes

An enquiry arrives at 4 pm on Friday through the form on your website. A salesperson sees it on Monday, gathers prices and lead times on Tuesday and sends a quote. A good reply at a fair price.

Except that on Friday the customer sent the same enquiry to three companies, and on Monday morning ordered from the one that answered first. They didn’t leave because of the price. They left because someone else replied first.

What the numbers say

Harvard Business Review published research on how quickly companies respond to web enquiries. Of the 2,241 companies tested:

• the average time to reply was 42 hours
• 23% never replied at all
• only 37% replied within an hour

On a second dataset of 1.25 million enquiries, they also showed why this matters. Companies that got in touch within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to have a real conversation with the customer as those that replied an hour later, and more than 60 times as likely as those that waited a day or more.

The research is American and not new, but customers have only become less patient since.

What it costs you

An example, not a promise: 100 enquiries arrive a month, and an average deal is worth €2,000. If slow replies lose you just five deals a month that you would otherwise have won, that is €10,000 a month, or €120,000 a year.

The worst part is that this loss shows up nowhere. It isn’t in the accounts or in the sales report. A customer who bought elsewhere simply never gets in touch again.

Why replies are slow

Rarely because salespeople are lazy. Usually it is one of these:

• Enquiries land in a shared inbox. The info address, the web form, an individual salesperson’s email. Someone has to read and forward them, and that happens whenever it happens.
• Every reply needs something looked up. The price list, stock levels, delivery terms, this customer’s discount. Each piece of data lives in a different system.
• Half the enquiries are the same questions. Price, lead time, availability. And every time the reply is written from scratch.
• Nobody can see what is waiting. An enquiry that hasn’t been forwarded doesn’t exist until someone remembers it.
• The salesperson is out on the road or on holiday. Their enquiries wait for them.

What it looks like with AI

1. 16:02Enquiry arrives from the website
2. 16:02Sorted: new quote, Birmingham
3. 16:03Draft from price list and stock
4. 16:10Salesperson checks and sends

AI reads the enquiry, recognises what the customer wants and who it belongs to, and prepares a draft reply from your price list, stock levels and terms. The salesperson reads it, corrects it if needed and sends it. It looks like this:

The customer gets a reply before 4:15 pm on Friday, not on Tuesday. The salesperson didn’t spend half an hour looking up prices and stock, just a few minutes checking.

And when the salesperson is out on the road, the enquiry doesn’t wait for them. It is sorted, the draft is ready and it is clear who should pick it up.

What stays with people

AI doesn’t replace the salesperson. It takes over reading, sorting, looking up data and the first draft. People keep:

• Approval. At the start, AI sends nothing on its own. A salesperson reviews every draft. Only once the numbers show the drafts are accurate can simple replies, such as confirming receipt, go out automatically.
• Negotiation. Special prices, large customers and long-term contracts are a job for a person.
• Complaints and unhappy customers. AI recognises them and puts them straight at the top, but a person replies.

What you can check this week

Take your last 50 enquiries and write down two things for each: when it arrived and when the first reply went out. Then group them by what the customer was asking.

Most companies discover two things: that the average reply time is much longer than they thought, and that more than half the enquiries come down to a few identical questions. That is exactly the work AI does best.

If enquiries and quotes also end up retyped into the ERP or CRM by hand, there is a second problem there, which we covered in the article on manual data entry.

How we work

This is exactly what we do: we bring AI into business processes, and customer enquiries are one of the best processes to start with because the saving shows immediately. We connect AI to your price list, stock and terms, inside your own Azure subscription, and start with a pilot on your real enquiries. A salesperson approves every reply, and we measure how much faster you respond and how many drafts were right. The first step is a free 30-minute call.

Sources

• The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, James B. Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington, Harvard Business Review, March 2011