New inquiries, repeat ones, the urgent ones, and real sales opportunities arrive sorted instead of scattered. You answer the ones that count first.
It gathers the signals about new inquiries, repeat inquiries, urgent inquiries, and sales opportunities from across your channels, removes duplicates, and sets priorities.
In a small business, inquiries do not come through one door. WhatsApp, a Google Business Profile message, an Instagram DM, a personal cell, and the shop phone all ring at once, and one person answering them drops some. A new customer's about-to-buy question and an existing customer's complaint land in the same inbox, so an urgent complaint gets buried under a quote request or the reverse. A slow reply is itself lost revenue, and with no record of who asked what and when, every reply starts over from scratch.
We gather the work as it actually arrives, and record what each step is judged against.
Combine inquiries from WhatsApp, Google Business, email, and DMs into one time-ordered queue, and auto-attach the same customer's past conversation to restore context.
Label each inquiry as new (pre-purchase), returning (checking an open item), urgent (loss if no answer today), or complaint (defect, dissatisfaction, refund).
Send quote requests to the quote desk, shipping to order and delivery, defects and refunds to the CS lead, and invoicing to accounting, and apply a backup rule when someone is out.
Draft a confirmation that it is received and when they will get an answer, along with a request for the minimum info needed (order number, purchase date, photos).
Build a case card holding the customer, channel, intent, deadline, owner, and next action, and track it as open.
We settle the exceptions that actually come up before they do. When a rule doesn't fit, we don't force it through. It goes to a person, with the evidence.
Narrow candidates with alternate identifiers (name, rough purchase date, part of the delivery address) and ask a person to confirm this is the right person, and do not match on your own and expose someone else's data.
Open the higher-urgency complaint as the main case and branch the new purchase intent into a separate case, keeping both alive.
Do not force a label. Leave it as unclassified, needs a person, but set the deadline timer at the most urgent level so it is not left to rot.
Anything touching money, contracts, personal data, or the brand is drafted and no further. It sends only after a person approves.
Tone and whether to offer compensation bear directly on brand trust, so a person reads and sends it.
A wrong match exposes someone else's data, so a person confirms it is the same person.
It creates cost and a precedent, so it is a person's or the CS lead's call.
The relationship context is known to a person, not code.
Wording that carries brand voice is approved by a person before release.
How you know it worked
53% of U.S. online adults are likely to abandon a purchase if they cannot find a quick answer to their question (Forrester, Customer Lifecycle Survey, 2015)
Measure first-response time and chat abandonment before and after rollout. Even an immediate receipt confirmation cuts abandonment sharply.
Industry average around 70%, best in class 80% plus, retail 78% (SQM Group, 2024)
It rises the more you route the first responder to the person with authority.
The goal is to converge to zero by removing cross-channel blind spots with one merged queue.
Taking in an inquiry means collecting personal information such as names, contact details, and addresses, so you need a lawful basis and a notice at collection. There is no single US privacy law. For US customers, California's CCPA and CPRA require a notice at collection and the country is a state-by-state patchwork, while for EU or UK customers the GDPR requires a lawful basis (Art. 6) and notice at collection (Art. 13). When you merge history across channels, do not combine records without confirming they are the same person, since a wrong match can expose one customer's data to another.
Once the scattered checks and repeat replies are drafted and sorted, your staff can spend the day on review and exceptions, and you look only at the decisions that matter.
Get an assessmentInquiries come in over WhatsApp Business, Google Business Profile, phone, and email, and a staffer checks each one, copies it into a spreadsheet, and replies.
Every inquiry lands in one queue, sorted and drafted, and staff handle just the checking, sending, and exceptions.
The things people actually check first about Customer inquiry intake.
WhatsApp, a Google Business Profile, email, Instagram DMs, and phone notes all merge into one inbox. A person watches a single queue instead of hopping between apps.
We use time-pressure and dissatisfaction signals as the priority axis to pin urgent and complaint at the top, and alert a person before the deadline timer runs out.
For factual checks like stock and hours it drafts an immediate reply, and for anything with cost, compensation, or personal data it only takes in and organizes, with a person approving the send.
First response time
Gathering info before a quote can be joined up the same way, on the channels you already use, from intake through to the approval queue.
Handling time
Booking and consultation intake can be joined up the same way, on the channels you already use, from intake through to the approval queue.
Unanswered inquiries
Order and shipping status updates can be joined up the same way, on the channels you already use, from intake through to the approval queue.
Inquiries, bookings, quotes, order updates. You can compare the work that keeps a person busy, side by side.
