Automation Opportunity Finder
Twelve questions about how an enquiry reaches you and what happens to it after. You get a ranked answer on where automation would actually pay, a map of that step as it runs now against what it could be, and the hours a week it is costing.
Answer for how things actually work on a normal week, not how they are supposed to. Nothing here is scored against an industry average, because we do not have one and neither does anybody quoting one at you.
How this works
Five parts of the process, two questions each, scored for how much of the step depends on a person remembering something. Plus two questions that size the opportunity and are deliberately not scored: being busy is not a problem, and a tool that scored volume would tell every busy business it had one.
The five rules the score follows
- Every answer carries points, and more points means more manualEach of the ten scored questions is worth up to four. Your score is the total as a percentage of what was available, so it says how much of this process is done by hand and nothing about how you compare to anybody else.
- The five areas are scored separatelyThe one with the highest percentage is the opportunity the result leads with. Ties go to whichever comes first in the customer's path, so the same answers always give the same result.
- "Not relevant" removes a question from both sidesIt is not counted as a good answer or a bad one, and an area where nothing applies scores zero rather than inventing an opportunity.
- The hours are your two numbers multipliedEnquiries a week times admin minutes each. The headline figure multiplies the middle of each band and the range beside it multiplies the two extremes, which is why the range is wide. Nothing is compared to an average and no saving is assumed.
- Under five enquiries a week overrides the scoreAt that volume a build costs more than the hours it returns, however manual the process is, so the result says so before it says anything else.
Change one answer and you should be able to predict what moves before you see it. If you cannot, the fault is ours and we would like to know.
The five areas, and what we would leave human in each
Every area carries something we would not automate. A page that recommends automating everything is selling rather than advising, and the parts worth protecting are usually the ones a customer notices.
- Capturing the enquiry
- The reply itself. Capturing a name and a number is clerical; deciding what to say to that person is not, and a first reply that reads as generated loses the enquiry the capture just saved.
- Replying and routing
- Anything past the first answer. An acknowledgement that admits it is automatic is fine and buys you time; a whole conversation that pretends to be a person is the thing customers remember, and not kindly.
- Following up
- The decision to stop, and anything for a customer who has already said no. An automated sequence that keeps going after somebody declined is how a business gets blocked.
- After they pay
- The first real conversation about the work. Automating the receipt is worth doing; automating the relationship at the exact moment somebody has just trusted you with money is not.
- Knowing what happened
- Reading it. A report nobody discusses is a slower version of not measuring, and no tool fixes that.
Every question (12 of them)
Published so the whole thing is readable without using it, and so it still works as a discussion checklist if you would rather answer these round a table than on a screen.
Capturing the enquiry
When an enquiry arrives, where do the details end up?
The name, the number, and what they asked for.
- Nowhere. It stays in the conversation it arrived in
- A notebook or a note on somebody's phone
- Typed into a spreadsheet by hand
- Into a system, without anybody retyping it
How often does the same detail get typed into a second place?
- Every time. Quote, invoice and delivery note all get it again
- Often, for anything that becomes a job
- Rarely
- Never. It is entered once and everything reads from that
Replying and routing
Who is expected to reply to a new enquiry?
- Nobody in particular. Whoever notices it
- Several of us can, and there is no rule about who
- One person, and somebody else when they are away
- One named person, and it is written down
How much of a first reply is something you have typed before?
Prices, delivery areas, opening hours, whether you do a particular thing.
- Most of it. The same three answers, over and over
- About half
- Some, but each one needs real thought too
- Little. Every enquiry is genuinely different
Following up
Somebody enquires, you reply, and then they go quiet. What happens?
- Nothing. It is gone
- Somebody chases if they remember
- There is a written routine and a person does it by hand
- A reminder or a sequence handles it without anybody remembering
And after a quote or a price has gone out?
- Nothing follows it up
- Sometimes, when it is a big one
- Always, by hand
- Automatically, on an agreed schedule
After they pay
Once somebody has paid, what starts the work?
- Somebody tells somebody else, usually in a message
- It goes on a list that a person maintains
- Some of it is automatic, some is by hand
- Payment triggers the next step on its own
Does the customer get a confirmation without anybody writing one?
- No. Somebody types it, or nobody does
- Sometimes, depending on who handled it
- Yes, every time, automatically
- Not relevant to how we sell
Knowing what happened
How many enquiries did you get last month, and how many became work?
- No way of knowing
- I could work it out by scrolling back
- It is in a sheet somebody keeps up to date
- A report I can open right now
When something is missed, how do you find out?
An enquiry nobody answered, a step skipped, a payment not chased.
- The customer tells us, or we never find out
- Somebody spots it later
- There is a regular check by a person
- Something alerts us at the time
What this cannot tell you
It cannot price the work. What a fix costs depends on which systems it has to reach and how tidy those are, and no set of twelve answers reveals that. It cannot see the constraint you did not mention, and it takes every answer at face value: a process that looks predictable from a distance often is not once somebody writes it down.
It also says nothing about whether AI specifically is involved. Most of what comes out of this well needs a rule, a record and a notification rather than a model. If you want the cost of the job in shillings, the Manual Work Cost Calculator does that part, and the Business Systems Check covers the wider setup including search and the website, which this tool ignores entirely.
Where to go from here
Where do you want to start?
A website that brings in no enquiries. A business nobody finds on Google. The same job done by hand every week. Tell us which one it is.
Have a project in mind? Send an enquiry.
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