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Your 10 questions, in 20 minutes

You answer the same messages every day. You know it. But you've never counted, so you don't know which ones, or what they cost you. Here's how I count, before I build anything.

It takes 20 minutes, your inbox, and a sheet with two columns.

1. Take the last 50. Not the worst 50.

Open the place where your customers write to you most. Email, Instagram, WhatsApp, site chat: doesn't matter, take the main channel. If you have several, mix them.

Take the last 50 incoming messages, in order, without skipping one. Not the ones that annoy you, not the ones you remember. The last 50.

This is the point that skews everything if you cheat. We remember the complicated messages. The problem is the simple ones.

2. One line per message, two columns.

Column 1: the message in five words. "Where is my order", "Size M in stock", "How do I return". Column 2: the category.

Start with six categories, no more:

• Delivery time (shipping, dispatch, when will it arrive)
• Size / choice (which size, which colour, will it work for…)
• Return / exchange (how, within how long, refund)
• Order tracking (where is my parcel, tracking number, lost parcel)
• Availability (restock, out of stock, pre-order)
• Other

You only add a category if "Other" goes past five messages. At that point, look at what's inside: there's a seventh category hiding. At many brands it's "Change my order" or "Reseller / wholesale".

If you hesitate between two categories: write the first sentence you would reply. Your answer tells you the category.

3. Count. Rank.

Add up each category. Then, inside each category, group the messages that call for the same answer. "Where is my order" and "haven't received my parcel" is the same answer: one single question.

Rank by descending count. The first ten lines are your 10 questions.

Look at the total of those ten lines out of 50. That's your repetition rate. I'm not giving you an average figure: count your own, it's the only one that matters.

4. For each of the ten: does the answer already exist?

One more column, three possible boxes:

• Already exists: the answer is in your FAQ, your shipping page, a template email, an internal doc. Someone at your company retypes it anyway.
• Exists in one head: a single person knows the answer, nothing is written down.
• Doesn't exist: every time, it gets decided case by case.

You've just separated three different problems. The first is a problem of pure repetition. The second is a risk, the day that person is on holiday. The third is a decision you haven't made yet, and that you make again fifty times.

5. Put a price on it, out loud

Take your numbers, not mine:

(messages per day) × (minutes per reply) × 5 days = minutes per week.

Example with an assumption: 30 messages a day, 4 minutes each. That's 120 minutes a day, 10 hours a week. A day and a half of someone's time, every week, rewriting answers that already exist.

Replace with your real numbers. If you don't know your minutes per reply, time yourself on five replies tomorrow morning.

6. What you do with it

Three options, from simplest to most complete:

1. You write the ten answers once and for all, in a shared doc, and the whole team copy-pastes. It's free and it gets done tonight.
2. You move the ten up into your FAQ and your contact page, using your customers' words, not yours. Part of the messages will stop coming.
3. You have a system answer: it reads the message, searches your own documents, writes the reply, and sends it. That's what I build. On my systems, the reply is written in about thirty seconds, sources cited.

Options 1 and 2 don't depend on me. Do them.