Instagram, WhatsApp, email, the phone. One question, four inboxes.
Owners describe the same enquiry arriving in four places and being answered four times. The channels multiplied. The question never changed.
Count the places a customer can reach you. Phone. Email. The form on your site. Instagram. WhatsApp. Facebook. Maybe a review site that sends messages too.
Seven doors. One of you.
One owner described it well on a forum. Between Instagram, WhatsApp and email, managing it was draining. A hundred and thirty people replied, which tells you how normal this is now.
The channels multiplied. The question did not.
This is the bit worth noticing. You did not get seven times more questions when you got seven channels.
You got the same five questions, arriving in seven places, at seven different times, with no memory of each other.
The work did not go up because demand went up. It went up because the same work got split into pieces.
Three costs of the split
Things get lost. Not often. Just often enough. A message sits unread in an app you check twice a week, and by the time you see it the job has gone.
Your answers drift apart. You quote from memory on WhatsApp. Your website says something slightly different. Your Instagram bio has last year's price. Nobody is lying and everything disagrees.
You are never off. Seven apps means seven sets of notifications. There is no closing time, because one of them is always lit up.
Closing a channel is allowed
Before buying anything, ask which doors you actually need open.
Plenty of businesses turn off Facebook messages and point them at the phone. Nothing bad happens. The people who wanted you still find you.
The fear is always that you will lose work. The honest answer is that you lose a little, and you get an hour a day back. For some businesses that is a good trade. For others it is not. Work out which you are before you decide.
One answer, many doors
If you keep the doors open, the thing to fix is not the number of apps. It is the fact that your answers live in your head and get retyped every time.
Write the five answers down once, properly, in one place. Then every channel is reading from the same sheet, even if you are the one doing the typing.
That alone fixes the drifting prices, which is the cost that quietly does the most damage.
It is also the idea behind what we build. hailera keeps one set of answers that your website and other apps can ask, so there is one version to keep right rather than seven. You write them and you check them before anyone sees them.
But the writing-down step is the part that helps most, and you can do that today with a notes app and twenty minutes.
Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.