Enquiries that arrive with the detail you need.
Plenty of businesses do not need more enquiries. They need the ones they already get to arrive with enough information to act on, so the answer is a price, a booking or an honest no — rather than three more messages working out what the job actually is.
Get a Free Enquiry Review →Send us what your customers write now and we will tell you what is missing.
Six questions, or four days of messages.
The job is not lost. It is sitting in your inbox, waiting on the third thing you have had to ask.
Nobody minds answering questions. The trouble is when they get asked one at a time, hours apart, because neither side is at their phone at the same moment. Every round trip adds most of a day, and none of the questions were a surprise.
- Mon 09:12“Hi, how much for a new boiler?”
- Mon 12:40Happy to help. What have you got at the moment?
- Mon 19:05“Not sure, it came with the house.”
- Tue 08:15No bother. How many bedrooms and bathrooms?
- Tue 18:30“3 bed, 1 bathroom. Is that enough?”
- Wed 07:50Almost. Can you send a photo of the boiler?
- Wed 21:10“Photo attached.”
Four days, seven messages, and not one thing you did not already know you would have to ask.
- NeedReplacing the boiler, not repairing it
- NowCombi, roughly 14 years old, in the kitchen
- Property3 bedrooms, 1 bathroom
- Moving itNo, staying where it is
- TimingNext month or so
- PhotoAttached
Same customer, same questions. Asked before they hit send, while they were already thinking about it.
An illustration rather than a real exchange. Some enquiries genuinely do need a conversation — the point is that this one did not, and it had one anyway.
If that thread looks familiar, a free review will tell you which questions would have saved it.
Get a Free Enquiry Review →What counts as useful is not the same in every business.
Three examples, chosen because the information problem is genuinely different in each one — not simply because the trade is.
Replacing a boiler
The property decides the answer, not the customer’s preference — and most of what sets the price takes them a minute to tell you.
- What is there now, and roughly how old
- Where it sits, and whether it is moving
- Bedrooms and bathrooms
- Anything that has been going wrong with it
- A photo of the existing unit
It still will not price a system change. What it does is tell you whether this is a straight swap or a survey.
A new client enquiry
For clinics, practices and professional services, the information decides who picks it up and how quickly — not what it costs.
- What they are actually asking about
- Whether they have been seen or dealt with before
- Anything time-bound: a deadline, a renewal, a referral
- Who they were dealing with previously, if anyone
- How they would rather be contacted
None of this is about price. Its job is to spot the enquiries that should not be sitting in a queue at all.
An extension
The useful question is not what it costs. It is whether the job is ready to be priced at all, which the customer often does not know either.
- What they are hoping to build, roughly
- Approximate footprint, even as a guess
- Whether planning is granted, applied for or not started
- Whether drawings already exist
- When they are hoping to start
- Photos of the space
Nobody prices an extension from a form. Planning status alone tells you whether this is a quote, a conversation, or a note in the diary for the spring.
Illustrations of the kind of thing worth asking, not a specification and not work we are describing for any particular customer. The right list for your business comes out of the jobs you actually take and the questions you are tired of having to ask.
Most businesses need less of this than they think.
There is a spectrum here, and the honest answer is that plenty of businesses stop early on it and are right to.
- 1
A plain contact form
Name, email, message. If the enquiries you already get are clear enough to act on, this is the correct answer and anything more is money wasted.
- 2
A few questions that matter
Three or four fields, chosen because they change what you do next. This is where most businesses notice the difference, and it is not a big piece of work.
- 3
Questions that adapt
What gets asked depends on the answer before it, so nobody wades through a section that does not apply to them.
- 4
A quote or booking request
For work where the enquiry has to carry enough to price or schedule, with photos, measurements or documents where they genuinely help.
- 5
Connected to what happens next
Acknowledgement, routing, reminders and follow-up — worth adding once the information arriving is actually worth automating.
Steps two and three cover most service businesses. If somebody is selling you step five before you have done step two, it is worth asking why. Step five is also where this stops being our job and becomes automation work: automating a poor enquiry only delivers a poor enquiry faster, so the questions come first.
Businesses where an enquiry starts a decision, not a purchase.
Trades and home services, clinics and practices, professional and financial services, property and lettings, event and hire businesses across Westhill, Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire.
The test is simple: if you read an enquiry and your first thought is usually a question rather than an answer, this is the gap. If you are a trade specifically, websites for trades covers the same ground with the operational detail. Call 07577 796931 or send us the details.
What people ask before changing their form.
Is this not just a contact form?
A contact form is the first step of it, and sometimes the right one. The difference is what gets asked and what happens next: questions chosen because they change your response, questions that adapt to earlier answers, and an enquiry that arrives sorted rather than as a paragraph you have to decode.
Will a longer form not put people off?
A badly designed one will, and that is a real risk. But length is not the variable. People happily answer six questions that obviously relate to their own job, and abandon three that feel like snooping. What decides it is whether each question looks like it is there to help them get an answer. Asking four useful things beats asking twelve, and beats asking one.
Can it give customers a price automatically?
Only where the pricing genuinely is that predictable — a standard service, a fixed rate, a simple product. For most quoted work, routing the enquiry properly is worth more than a number nobody can stand behind.
Where does the AI part come in?
Less than you might expect, and deliberately. Choosing the questions is a design job, not an AI one. Where it genuinely helps is tidying a messy free-text answer into something readable and sorting enquiries by type. It does not decide whether a job is worth taking. You do.
Can it stop unsuitable enquiries?
It can reduce them by being clear early about the work you take and the areas you cover. It will not stop them, because people skim. What changes is how quickly you can tell, and how little time it costs you to spot one.
Start with what your customers actually send.
Send us a few of the enquiries you get now — the vague ones especially — and what you end up having to ask before you can respond. We will come back with what is usually missing and what would be worth asking up front. A short piece of work, not a consulting exercise.
Get a Free Enquiry Review →Tell us what you have to ask every time.
The question you find yourself repeating, and what a typical enquiry looks like when it lands. That is enough for a useful first conversation.
- 07577 796931
- lee@westhillai.com
- Westhill, Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire
- We reply within one business day.
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