MURETA INSIGHTS AUTOMATION
How to automate enquiry follow up without losing the personal touch
Build a simple enquiry workflow that confirms receipt, assigns an owner and leaves room for judgement.
01 / AUTOMATION
Map one enquiry before you connect any tools
Take an enquiry that recently went well and trace what happened from submission to reply. Where did it arrive? Who owned it? What information did they check before responding? Then repeat the exercise with one that got missed. If the main problem is that nobody owns the inbox on Fridays, a new tool will only move the same problem somewhere else.
Start with one form, one place to track requests and one named owner. A Sydney landscaping business may want every job request in the same list. An Auckland wholesaler might separate trade applications from delivery questions. A US studio working across time zones may want acknowledgements sent immediately but tasks assigned during the team’s working hours.
02 / AUTOMATION
Automate the receipt and routing, keep judgement with your team
A receipt message can confirm the enquiry arrived and say when a person will reply. Avoid promising a quote, price or deadline before someone checks the request. Then assign the enquiry by a field you trust, such as the service chosen. If a field is missing or ambiguous, send it to a shared review queue instead of guessing.
A simple tracker needs the time received, customer contact, owner and status. Store only what the team needs to respond. If you use an AI tool to draft a reply, have someone review it before sending. That matters when the customer has described an unusual deadline, a complex job or information your team should handle carefully.
03 / AUTOMATION
Try the awkward cases before you turn it on
Submit the same enquiry twice, leave out an optional field and test what happens if one of the connected tools is unavailable. Check whether the team gets a useful alert and whether the original message can still be recovered. Give someone responsibility for checking errors, and document how to fall back to the inbox if the workflow stops.
Review the first few weeks with the person who actually handles enquiries. Look at which requests were missed, which got assigned to the wrong person and how long it took to reach a human. Fix the routing rule or the handover before adding a new reminder. A workflow has done its job when a customer can still reach someone even if the automation fails.