What one missed after-hours enquiry actually costs you

Every article about missed enquiries opens with a statistic. Seventy-eight per cent of customers buy from whoever responds first. Businesses lose forty per cent of leads to slow replies.

Chase those numbers down and they almost always end at a survey commissioned by a company selling response software. The sample is unclear, the industry is not yours, and the country usually is not either.

So here is the version with no statistics in it. Four numbers you already have, and the arithmetic.

The four numbers

1. Your average job or sale value.

Not your best month. The middle. If you are a plumber it might be $400. A salon, $120. A physio, $95 for an initial consult — though for anything with repeat visits, use the value of a client who comes back, not one appointment.

2. How many enquiries arrive when you cannot answer them.

Count, do not guess. Open Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp and look at the timestamps on the last month of first-contact messages. Count the ones outside the hours you actually reply. Evenings, weekends, while you were on a job.

Most people are surprised here, in both directions. Some find two. Some find thirty.

3. How many of those never turned into anything.

Of the after-hours ones, how many got a reply hours or days later and simply stopped? No booking, no follow-up, conversation ends.

You will not be exact. Be roughly right.

4. How long your customers stay.

For a one-off trade job, one job. For a salon, a gym, a clinic — a client who books once and keeps coming is worth a multiple of one appointment. Use whatever you honestly believe.

The arithmetic

(2) enquiries you can't answer, per month
  × (3) share that go cold
  = enquiries lost per month

  × (1) average value
  × (4) repeat multiple
  = what it costs you per month

Two worked examples. These are examples, not claims about your trade.

A plumber. Average job $400. Eleven after-hours first-contact messages last month. Of those, four went nowhere. One job each, no repeat multiple.

4 × $400 = $1,600 a month

A salon. Average visit $120, and a client who sticks around is worth roughly six visits. Nine after-hours enquiries, three went cold.

3 × $120 × 6 = $2,160 a month

Against A$99 per location per month, both of those are not close. But run it with two enquiries a month and one going cold, and the plumber is looking at $400 against $99 — real, but not dramatic, and you would want to be confident in the numbers.

That is the point of doing it yourself. For some businesses the answer is obviously yes, for some it is marginal, and for a business that gets four DMs a month it is no. Anyone who tells you it is always yes is selling something.

Two things the arithmetic misses

The reviews you do not get. A customer who never got a reply does not usually leave a bad review. They just do not leave a good one. That does not show up in any calculation and it compounds, because your rating is what the next person reads first.

The evenings. If you currently answer after-hours messages, you are doing it at 9pm on the couch. The arithmetic above treats those as saved. They are not costing you revenue — they are costing you evenings. Whether that belongs in the sum is up to you, but it is the reason a lot of owners want this solved even when the money is marginal.

The window nobody mentions

One wrinkle that makes the "get to it later" plan worse than it looks.

Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp all close the messaging window roughly 24 hours after the customer's last message. Reply after that and you often cannot reach them at all — not slower, not at all. A Friday-night message read on Monday morning is frequently not a late reply, it is no reply. The windows are set out here.

So "I'll answer it when I get a chance" is not a slower version of answering. Past a point it is the same as not answering, except you also spent the time.

What to do with your number

If it is small, do nothing. Genuinely. Check your messages twice a day and spend the money elsewhere.

If it is large, the question is not whether to fix it but how:

• Answer them yourself, faster. Free, and it costs evenings.
• Have someone answer for you. Works if you have the person.
• Answer the routine ones automatically. Suburb, callout fee, opening hours, price, how soon — the ones where the answer does not depend on you, which is what we built.

All three work. Which one is right depends on the number you just worked out, and that number is yours, not an industry average.