You answer the same question forty times a week. Which five?

It is never the hard questions that eat the day.

The hard ones are interesting. Someone wants something unusual and you get to think. Those are fine.

It is the parking. The opening hours. The deposit. Whether you cover that postcode. The same four or five answers, typed out again, while you are trying to do the actual work.

Work out what it really costs

Most people have never added this up, so it stays a vague feeling of being busy.

Try it with your own numbers. Say you answer the same question 40 times a week. Say each one takes two minutes, including finding the message and getting back to what you were doing.

That is 80 minutes a week. Around 60 hours a year. A week and a half of working days, spent typing things you already know.

Use your own figures rather than ours. The point is not the number. The point is that it is a real number, and it has been invisible.

The hidden cost is worse than the time

Two minutes is not really two minutes. It lands in the middle of something else.

You are up a ladder, or mid-quote, or with a customer. The phone goes. You break off, answer, and come back slightly wrong. That is the real cost and it does not show up in any tally.

Which one to kill first

Do not try to fix all five. Pick the one that is both common and boring to answer.

Usually that is the area question, or the hours, or whether you take card. Something with a fixed answer that never changes.

Leave the ones where the answer really does depend. Those are worth a conversation, and you will not save time on them anyway.

Four ways to stop answering it, from free upwards

Write it on the page people land on. Free, and works for the people who read. Many will not.

Put it in your saved replies. Free, and cuts two minutes to ten seconds. It does not cut the interruption, which is the expensive part.

Put it where they are already looking. Your profile, your listing, the top of your page rather than a page nobody clicks.

Let something answer it for you. This only works if it answers from what you actually wrote, and says so when it does not know. That is the difference between helping and embarrassing you.

Check it worked

This is the step everyone skips. Count that one question again in a month.

If it still arrives 40 times, your answer is in the wrong place. Move it, do not write it again. People are not ignoring you. They are not getting that far.

Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.