The Captain's Report · Report No. 4

The message nobody answered

Report No. 4 — Hello. Fourth week, fourth case: a sale that arrived on its own — and left on its own. Short — that's how I talk.

Listen to the report

The case

A shop got a message on a Friday night: a customer asking about a product, price and all — he wanted to sort out a gift for Saturday. The message sat there, read, on the shop's phone. Saturday was a full-counter day and nobody went back to that conversation. On Sunday the customer bought the same thing somewhere else, and on Monday he wrote about it in a three-star review: "The product, great. They never answered me." Looking back over the month, it wasn't one case: it was eleven unanswered messages in thirty days. Eleven sales that had already arrived on their own, with a name and a concrete question, and died waiting for a "yes, we have it."

What a manager would do

No message goes unanswered, and that never depends on anybody's memory: every channel has an owner, and the inbox gets closed twice a day, the same way the till gets closed. If the full answer can't go out right away, the acknowledgment does — "got it, I'll confirm today by 6 pm" — and it gets logged with an owner and a time. An unanswered message is not a small oversight: it's the customer who already did all the work of showing up, asking and waiting, and took his money elsewhere.

Rule #4

«The message you don't answer the same day, someone else sells.»

Next week: the stock that got counted twice.

Relax. It's already in motion.
— Bossty. General Manager

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