What Your Website Isn't Doing

Everything up to this point has been about awareness and persuasion. Getting found, being understood, and getting somebody to raise their hand. This part is about what happens in the minutes and days after they do, and who does it.

For SMBs, the answer is you. Or someone in your team. The website collects a name and an email and forwards it to an inbox, which makes it a very expensive postbox.

What a website can actually take on

Look at your week and find the tasks with these things in common. Are they happening over and over? Is the information going into each activity similar each time? Are the rules generally stable in how you do that routine work? You could write them down if somebody made you. And the person doing them is more capable than the job requires.

When a qualified professional is retyping details from an email into a spreadsheet, or answering the same question for the ninth time this month, or working out a price from a rate card they know by heart, the work they were hired for gets postponed.

This is not about having fewer people. In every business we have worked with the problem is the opposite. There is more work than there are hours, and the work that gets dropped is the valuable work, because the routine work shouts louder. Quotes get done because somebody is waiting. The follow-up, the thinking, the improvements, those wait until next week, every week.

Three things to start with

Answering. Count the questions you answer constantly for a week. Do you service my area? Do you work with businesses my size? How long does it take? What happens if it goes wrong?

The bad version of fixing this is a chat bubble that appears three seconds after somebody is on your website, interrupts what they were reading, and cannot answer anything specific. It then asks the user for their email for a human to connect with them. A visitor closes this fast, or worse they close the whole tab!

Instead, have a trained AI chat agent that knows your business and answers from your material: your service pages, your pricing, your documented process. When it does not know, it should not make up an answer, and it should say so plainly with an offer to connect to a person, rather than popping up with "What's your email?". Before you build anything though, check that those ten questions are already answered in plain text somewhere on your site. Half of them usually are not.

Qualifying and routing. Every enquiry has a few decisions made about it. Is this a fit for us? What is it roughly worth? Who should handle it? How urgent? In most businesses one experienced person makes all these decisions, in their head, using rules they have never written down, whenever they get around to it.

Write the rules down as a scorecard for your team, or automate this in the CRM. Put your last thirty enquiries through this scorecard and see if it stacks up. Note: this scorecard is worth documenting whether or not you ever automate it. Once it exists, your site can apply it the moment an enquiry arrives, so the good one gets flagged rather than discovered days later.

Quoting. Businesses that say every job is different are usually wrong. The jobs vary, but the variables do not. If you can produce a ballpark from a rate card, so can a system. It does not need to be a firm quote, and it should say plainly that it is not one. An indicative range given to the user automatically, delivered in ninety seconds, beats an exact number delivered in two days, because until your quote is in the buyer's inbox, they are exploring alternatives.

What not to hand over

Anything where being wrong is expensive and anything where human contact is the product, you keep that away from the website. If people buy from you because of how you handle the first conversation, do not automate the first conversation. Keep a human in the loop wherever being wrong costs your reputation.

Do the sum first

Before any of this, do a count. How many times a month does a task repeatedly happen, how many minutes does it take, and what does an hour of that person's time cost? Multiply it out. If the answer is small, stop and spend the money on one of the other recommendations. We suggest exploring automation once it costs your business more to either get back to customers, reduce your team's time on doing repeatable work, or when your competitors show signs of competitive advantage.