They DM you asking things the website already says.
A spa owner called it overwhelming. The questions are simple; the volume is the problem, and it arrives on four different apps at once.
A woman who runs a small beauty spa wrote about this on a business forum. She was worn out by customer messages.
Not difficult customers. Not complaints. Just people sending her simple questions, all day, on Instagram.
Sixty people replied. Most of them were living the same week.
Simple questions are the tiring ones
This is the odd part. A hard question is fine. It uses your skill and you feel useful afterwards.
"How much is a gel manicure?" at half past nine at night is not hard. It is just the ninth one today, and the price is on your page, and you are eating dinner.
Tiredness here is not about difficulty. It is about repetition arriving at times you did not choose.
Why they message instead of reading
It is tempting to think people are lazy. Mostly they are not. Three things are going on.
They never left the app. They found you on Instagram. Messaging you is one tap. Opening your website is a journey.
They want it confirmed by a person. Prices online are often out of date, and people know it. Asking you is how they check.
Their question is slightly different. Your page says gel manicure. They have got gel on already and want to know if removal costs extra. Close, but not the same question.
That third one is worth sitting with. Half of what looks like laziness is a small gap between what you published and what they need.
The advice that does not work
"Just put your prices in your bio." She had. "Just set an auto reply." She had that too, and people replied to it asking the same thing.
"Just ignore them until morning." That is real advice and some people can do it. Many cannot, because the message is from a customer and answering feels like the job.
What actually helped the people in that thread
Two things came up again and again.
Answer the question they are actually asking. Not the tidy version. If everyone asks about removal, put removal on the price list. One line kills a hundred messages a year.
Decide your hours and say them. "I reply to messages between 9 and 6" in your bio does more than any tool. People are surprisingly fine with it, as long as they know.
When something should answer for you
There is a point where writing it down is not enough, because the questions arrive in twenty different wordings and none of them match your page.
That is the case for letting something answer from what you wrote. Not making things up. Just recognising that "do you take gel off" and "is removal extra" are the same question, and giving your answer.
It is worth being honest about the limit though. Nothing fixes a customer who wants to hear it from you personally. Some people message because they want contact, and that is not a problem to solve.
Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.