The desk where nothing gets lost
I take one stretch of work where everything repeats, and a program starts running it. Your people stay on the conversation with the customer instead of moving data around.
For departments that already have sales managers and a flow of enquiries.
Sound familiar?
Monday, the morning meeting. You ask what happened to Thursday’s enquiry. Nobody remembers. It was in the personal inbox of somebody who is on leave.
Then you look at what your managers are busy with. One is copying data from an email into a spreadsheet. The second is writing the same email for the third time today. The third is trying to find out who has already replied.
The people are there, the work is moving, and some enquiries still get lost. And you know that one more person will not fix it: he will be doing the same thing, and then there will be four of them doing it.
What is included
Emails, forms from the site and messages come into a shared list instead of personal inboxes. Every one of them is visible and every one has an owner.
The assistant answers what people ask every day: availability, prices, timelines, documents. What it does not know it passes to a person together with the history of the conversation.
A record is assembled out of the email: who, what they want, for how much. The manager checks it and carries on instead of typing it in again.
Your mail, your customer database, your site. Nothing has to be moved or started from a blank sheet.
How much came in, how much closed without a person, how much is waiting and how long it has been waiting.
Who this is not for
If there is no flow yet, don’t buy this. What gets taken away here is what repeats many times over, and when there are five enquiries a week there is nothing to take away. You want “The storefront that answers”: the task there is a different one, to be found and to answer at once.
And honestly about the second limit. A program takes on what a person does mechanically. Everything that needs thinking, negotiating or taking responsibility stays with your people, and that is right. I don’t take on a stretch of work where the decision costs money, and I advise you not to hand that over to a program either.
How it goes
I look at the stretch of work.
A meeting with you and with your managers. I ask how an enquiry travels through the department and where it falls out. People usually describe it more precisely than the head of the department does, because they do it by hand every day.
I agree with you what gets taken.
I write out a list of what exactly goes to the program and what stays with people. You read it and correct it before the work starts. After that I don’t depart from the list.
I build it and connect it.
To your mail, your database, your site. I show you working pieces as they come, not one lump at the end.
I check it on the live flow.
A week alongside you: I watch what the program answers and what it hands to people. I correct along the way.
I hand it over.
Everything sits with you, the access is yours, and I show you where to change what.
I name the timeline after I have looked at the work: it depends on how many systems have to be connected and what state your data is in.
What it looks like in practice
In companies where enquiries arrive in a shared inbox, the same thing happens every time. Several people read the email, whoever gets there first replies, and some of it nobody reads at all. A week later nobody can say how it ended.
After the work it is arranged differently. The email becomes an enquiry by itself: it has an owner, a history and a place where it stays visible. The assistant answers the repeating questions, and the rest reaches the right person.
Managers stop moving data around and start talking to customers. An enquiry doesn’t sit unread, because there is nowhere for it to sit.
Next
If you recognised your own department, write to me. Half an hour of review, and I will tell you whether there is anything here worth taking away. If the flow is still small, I will say so straight: too early.
Or ask the assistant on this page. It is built the same way yours will be, only it knows my business rather than yours.
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Solution Optimal
Ruslan Romanko
Digital workers and working environments that sit on your server and stay yours.