Category
Field notes
What arrives, what the assistant does with it, and where it stops and calls a person. One situation at a time.
- 4 min readThe Things an Assistant Structurally Cannot NoticeNot a list of current limitations that will close next year. A class of problem that has no message attached to it, and therefore nothing for any assistant to react to.
- 3 min readWhat the Morning Looks Like After a MonthNot fewer messages. A different kind of message. What an owner's first twenty minutes contain a month in, including the three things that got harder.
- 3 min readThe Enquiry That Was a ComplaintIt does not open with anger. It opens with a polite factual question, from somebody who already bought from you, and answering it correctly is the fastest way to make it worse.
- 4 min readAnswer in the Language They Wrote InThe rule is one line and almost everybody gets the exception wrong. Detection from the message rather than the profile, what happens with Russian typed in Latin letters, and the one case where the reply changes language on purpose.
- 5 min readThe Required Field Nobody Fills InEvery CRM has one. It is mandatory, three quarters of records carry the same default value, and everything downstream quietly assumes it means something.
- 4 min readTwo Hundred Messages and One BookingA community chat is not a sales channel with worse conversion. Point a selling assistant at one and you will watch it empty, slowly, in a way nobody reports as a complaint.
- 5 min readReading One Transcript ProperlyMost people read transcripts looking for a mistake. That is the buyer's way of reading. Here is one conversation in full and the six things a manager checks in it, none of which is tone.
- 4 min readThe Deposit Question Is Five QuestionsIt comes up in nearly every rental conversation and it is never quite the same question twice. Four versions of it belong to the assistant. One of them never will.
- 4 min readWhen the Customer Asks for a HumanHalf the time they do not ask in words. What the trigger is, what the person receives, what the customer is told, and the one version of this that loses you the customer outright.
- 4 min readA Price List Is Not a Price RuleA table answers the question it was built for. Customers ask the other one. The work of turning pricing into a rule takes an afternoon and is worth doing whether or not you ever automate anything.
- 4 min readA Falling Handover Rate Is Not Automatically Good NewsEveryone asks what percentage the assistant handles alone. It is the wrong first number, and the direction it moves in tells you nothing until you cut it by topic.
- 5 min readThe First Week Goes Wrong in Three PlacesIt is nearly always the same three, and none of them is the model getting an answer wrong. The first week is an audit of your own rules, conducted by something that follows them exactly.
- 4 min readWhat We Do Not AutomateEvery assistant has a list of things it must hand to a person. Ours is short, it is written down before launch, and the reasoning behind each line is the same one sentence.
- 4 min readThe Listing Was Already SoldA flat goes under contract on Thursday. Nobody updates the record until Monday. On Saturday at 22:40 someone asks about it, and the assistant answers from a system that is wrong.
- 3 min readSix Rooms, or OneA Telegram group with members in six countries is usually six conversations that ignore each other. What changes when everyone reads everything is not the volume. It is who answers.
- 3 min readOne Queue Instead of Five TabsThe same customer asked on Instagram, then WhatsApp, then email. Three people answered and gave three prices. Nobody was careless — the three of them could not see each other.
- 3 min readYour Customer Wrote Something Your CRM Has No Field For“Somewhere quiet, my mother has trouble with stairs.” No CRM has a field for that, and it is the whole reason the enquiry exists. What an assistant does with the part that does not fit.
- 3 min readA Booking Request at 02:14A rental enquiry arrives at 02:14 with no dates and no budget. Here is the whole exchange, turn by turn, and what the assistant had to work out before a booking existed.