The asymmetry customers notice
Enquiries before a sale get answered in an hour. Questions after payment get answered in three days. Customers register that difference precisely, and it is the source of a great deal of resentment.
It is rarely deliberate — pre-sale work has an obvious owner and post-sale work often does not.
Acknowledgement versus resolution
Most customers can accept that a fix takes time. What they cannot accept is not knowing whether their message was received.
A same-day acknowledgement with a realistic timeline defuses the majority of escalations.
Making it a standard
- Define a target response time and make it visible internally.
- Give post-sale enquiries a named owner.
- Route them into the same queue as new work, not a separate inbox.
- Review the ones that took longest, not the average.