You answer the same five questions every week, so write them down once

Open your sent folder and look at the last month. How many replies start with some version of "Yes, we do that" or "It usually takes about a week" or "You can find that here"?

For most small businesses, a large share of daily messages are the same few questions in different words. What are your hours. How long will it take. Do you cover my area. What happens if I need to change it. Each answer takes two minutes. Add them up and it is a real chunk of the week.

Why it keeps happening

The answers live in one person's head. When a question arrives, that person types the answer again, a little differently each time. Nobody decides to do it this way. It is just what happens when the answer was never written anywhere that other people, or a tool, could use.

The cost is not only time

Different wording means different promises. One customer is told a week, another is told five days, a third is told it depends. Later, someone has to explain why. And when the person who knows is away, the question waits, and the customer decides how much that wait says about you.

Find the five

You do not need software for this part. Do this:

1. Scroll back through a month of messages and mark every question you have answered more than twice.
2. Pick the five that come up most.
3. Write one clear answer for each, in plain words, the way you would say it to a customer.

Keep each answer short. If an answer needs a condition, write the condition, not a vague "it depends."

Put the answers where people can reach them

A shared document is fine. The point is that anyone on the team can copy the answer in ten seconds, and everyone says the same thing. Put the date you last checked it at the top, and one name next to each answer, so someone owns keeping it true.

Then look at what is left

Once the five are written, the questions that still come in are the interesting ones. They are the cases that need a person to think. That is where your time should go, and it is much easier to see them when the routine ones are handled.

Where a tool can help

After the answers exist, a tool can use them. It can draft the reply from the written answer, put it in front of a person to check, and send it. Without the written answers, a tool has nothing to work from and will guess. With them, it has your wording to follow. The writing comes first, the tool second.

Try it this week

Write down the answer to one question you were asked three times this month. Share it with your team. See how many fewer times you type it next month.

If you have a question you answer every week that never made it onto a page, tell us what it is in the comments. We read every one. For examples of how we build this kind of work, see octyn.co/casestudies.