Cutting Admin Time by Automating How Enquiries Reach the Right Person
A professional services firm's website enquiries all landed in one shared inbox, where they were manually read, categorised and forwarded — often a day or more after they arrived.
The Challenge
Every enquiry — new client leads, existing client questions, and general admin queries — arrived in the same inbox and had to be manually triaged before anyone could act on it. Genuine sales enquiries sometimes sat for a day or two behind lower-priority messages, and there was no consistent record of what had been followed up.
Our Strategy
Rather than replacing the team's judgement, we used AI to do the first pass: read each enquiry, classify its type and urgency, and route it accordingly — leaving a human to make the actual decision, faster and with better context.
Implementation
- Website enquiry form submits directly into an automation workflow instead of a plain inbox
- AI classifies each enquiry by type (new business, existing client, general) and urgency
- Qualified new-business enquiries are logged automatically in the firm's CRM with the classification attached
- Urgent enquiries trigger an immediate notification to the relevant team member
- Routine, low-urgency queries are queued for daily batch review instead of interrupting the team throughout the day
Technology
Automation
This is the same pattern described in more detail on our AI Solutions and Business Automation pages: AI handles the repetitive first pass, and the team focuses on judgement calls and relationship-building instead of manual sorting.
Results
- New-business enquiries are now flagged and logged in the CRM automatically, rather than waiting for someone to notice and re-key them
- Urgent queries reach the right person the same day, instead of sitting in a shared inbox until it's next checked
- The team reported spending noticeably less time on manual sorting and re-entry of enquiry details
Client name withheld at their request. We describe reported outcomes qualitatively here rather than publishing specific time-saved figures, since we don't have an independently audited before/after time study for this engagement.
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