Where the enquiry lands is a business rule, not a contact list
Routing decides who replies, and that decision is made of the same things that decide whether you can do the work at all: territory, product line, industry certification, and deal size. A contact page that hands every enquiry to one inbox turns those rules into a person’s memory, which is where they get lost.
City pages and service pages generate enquiries in different places, from different kinds of buyer, about different sizes of job. The usual arrangement sends all of them to one address, where a person sorts them by hand. That works until it does not, and the failure is invisible: the enquiry that went to the wrong person does not bounce, it just gets a slower and worse answer.
In the partner-network prototype we built, four questions take forty-two partners down to one. Each of the four is there because it changes who can actually do the work.
The four questions that decide
| Question | Why it changes who takes it |
|---|---|
| Which country | Territory agreements, language, who can be on site |
| Which product line | Not every partner is trained on every line |
| Which industry | Food and pharmaceutical work needs a certificate — experience alone is not enough |
| How big is the project | Past a threshold, a different team takes it |
The industry one is the least obvious and the most important. It is the difference between "can probably handle it" and "is allowed to handle it". A routing rule that only knows geography will send a pharmaceutical enquiry to a partner who cannot legally accept it, and nobody finds out until the customer asks for the certificate.
The threshold rule
Deal size changing the owner is the rule most companies apply informally and never write down. A large enquiry going to a regional partner instead of the head office team is not a small mistake — it is the largest opportunity in the pipeline being handled by whoever happened to be listed for that postcode.
Writing it into the routing does two things: the enquiry reaches the right team on the first pass, and the threshold becomes something the business can argue about and change deliberately, rather than something that varies by who is on duty.
What the visitor should see
The rules can run invisibly, but showing the outcome is better. When the page names the person or team who will reply, the enquiry stops being a message into a void. It also sets a check: if the named contact looks wrong to the visitor, he will say so before sending, which is much cheaper than finding out afterwards.
- Ask only the questions that change the routing. Anything else belongs after the reply.
- Show who it goes to, once the answers determine it.
- Say what happens next and when — a named person with no timeframe is still a void.
Part of
Location pages for a local service business, without the doorway problemHow to build city pages for a service business that operates in dozens of places, and the line between a useful location page and a doorway page.