Flow · 6 steps · 6 known jams
A message from a person who might buy, travelling from the form they filled to somebody who can actually answer what they asked.
Finished when
The sender has an answer to the thing they asked — not a request for a call — from somebody able to give it, while they still remember sending it.
Done when The form returned a confirmation and the message is stored somewhere with the sender’s address attached.
Where it stops
Enquiries are described as “down this month” with no other explanation.
The form posts to an address nobody owns, a mailbox nobody opens, or a script that has been failing silently since a DNS change. Nothing in the interface says so — a form that swallows submissions looks identical to a form nobody uses.
Cost. Invisible and total. Send one through it yourself, from outside your own network, and see whether it arrives; the test costs two minutes and is skipped for years.
Done when It has arrived in exactly one place, and a named person is responsible for that place.
Where it stops
“It must have gone to the other inbox.”
The website form goes to a shared mailbox, WhatsApp to somebody’s phone, Instagram to whoever has the password, and the phone to nobody after seven. Four queues, four response times, no single view, and the customer experiencing all of them as one company.
Cost. This is where most of the elapsed time in this flow is spent, and it is spent before anybody has read anything. It is also the cheapest step to fix and the one least often chosen, because fixing it is not visible to anyone outside.
Done when A person has opened it and can tell what is being asked.
Where it stops
Fast acknowledgements, slow answers.
The person who reads first is not the person who knows. The reply that goes out inside the hour is a holding message, and the real answer waits for somebody who has not been told it is waiting.
Cost. The acknowledgement makes the delay worse rather than better: the sender now knows they were received and are being left, which is a different experience from silence and a worse one.
Done when What they want is written down in the words the business uses, not the words they used.
Where it stops
Every enquiry consumes the same amount of senior time.
No qualification step exists, so a request that could be answered from a page and a request worth a proposal arrive in the same queue and are handled by the same person in the order they landed.
Cost. The expensive resource is spent first-come rather than best-first, and the enquiries worth having wait behind the ones that are not.
Done when A reply that addresses the question. A proposal to meet is not an answer to a question.
Where it stops
Every thread ends with “shall we book a call?”
Answering costs the business more than deferring, so deferring is what the process rewards. It is rarely a decision anybody made; it is what happens when nobody has written down what can be answered directly.
Cost. The buyers who would have bought after one clear reply are filtered out in favour of the ones willing to sit through a meeting, which is a different and smaller population.
Done when The exchange is in the customer record, reachable by somebody who was not part of it.
Where it stops
Nobody can reconstruct what was promised to a client six months ago.
The thread lives in a personal mailbox or a personal WhatsApp. It leaves when the person does, and until then it is a single point of retrieval for the entire relationship.
Cost. Named directly in the glossary as key-person risk, and it is the version of it that shows up in a due diligence. A pipeline that exists only in somebody’s phone is not an asset the business owns.
It looks like coverage and reads well on an org chart: every channel is staffed and nothing is unattended. What it actually produces is four response times, four standards of answer, and no way to see that the same person asked the same question twice through two of them. The customer is having one conversation and the company is having four.
InsteadOne record per customer, every channel writing into it, and a single queue with an owner and a stated time. The channels stay — people will keep using whichever they prefer — but they stop being separate processes with separate outcomes.
Every process has a written form and an actual one, and the queue is always in the actual one. We map what happens, from the records rather than from the meeting.