Almost every business we work with has the same two problems, and almost none of them would describe either one as a problem. The first is that they are harder to get hold of than they think. The second is that once someone does get in touch, what happens next depends on which person happened to see it.

Neither shows up on a report. You do not get told about the enquiry that was never sent because the only option was a form that looked abandoned, or about the message that sat unanswered for four days because the person who read it assumed a colleague had picked it up.

What follows walks through both halves, starting with how people reach you and ending with the unglamorous work of keeping it all running.

Being reachable is not the same as being everywhere

There is a temptation, once you start thinking about this, to add channels. A live chat widget, a WhatsApp number, a chatbot, a callback request. Each one seems like it can only help.

In practice every channel you offer is a promise that somebody will answer it, and an unanswered channel does more harm than one you never offered. The question is not how many ways someone can reach you, it is which ways the people you actually want to hear from prefer, and which of those you can genuinely keep on top of.

Read the full pieceWhich contact channels actually suit your customersEmail, phone, a form, live chat, WhatsApp. Offering every channel is not the same as being easy to reach, and each one you add is a promise that somebody will answer it. Read the full pieceWhat your contact page should ask for, and what it should promiseEvery extra field costs you enquiries, and every promise about replying gets remembered. Getting the balance right on the page most interested visitors end up at.

Every reply says something about you

Most businesses spend a good deal of thought on their website and almost none on the email that follows it, which is odd, because the email is the part a customer reads most carefully. It arrives in the middle of their day, with their full attention, and it is often the first thing they judge you on after the first conversation.

Two things quietly undermine it. The first is the signature, which is either doing no work at all or doing far too much, and in the latter case adding a full-resolution logo to every single reply until a short thread weighs more than the document attached to it. The second is whether your email arrives at all, which comes down to three DNS records most business owners have never been shown.

Still to comeEmail signatures: what belongs in one, and what quietly bloats every replyA signature is the most-seen piece of design your business owns. It is also, in most companies, the reason a short thread ends up several megabytes long.

Still to comeGetting your email to actually arrive: SPF, DKIM and DMARCThree records that decide whether your email reaches the inbox or the spam folder. What each one does in plain terms, and how to tell whether yours are right.

When one inbox stops being enough

There is a point, usually somewhere around the second or third person, where a single mailbox stops working. The symptoms are familiar. Messages get forwarded and then answered twice, or not at all. Somebody is on holiday and their inbox holds the only copy of a conversation. A password gets shared because it was easier than setting things up properly.

The first fix is a shared mailbox, and for a lot of businesses that is the whole answer. Past a certain volume it stops being enough too, and what you need is somewhere that knows who is dealing with what, keeps the history in one place, and does not lose the thread when somebody leaves.

Still to comeShared mailboxes, and when a personal inbox stops being enoughThe point at which forwarding to a colleague, or sharing a password, starts costing more than it saves, and what to move to instead.

Still to comeWhen a shared mailbox needs to become a support deskAssignment, internal notes, saved replies, and a record of who said what to whom. What a dedicated desk gives you that a mailbox cannot, and when it earns its keep.

The unglamorous half

None of the above matters if the mailbox itself is not looked after. The two things that most often go wrong are both entirely preventable, and both tend to be dealt with only after they have caused a problem.

Security is the first. Email is the key to almost every other account a business owns, which makes it the obvious thing to attack and the obvious thing to protect properly. The second is simple housekeeping, because a mailbox that fills up does not warn you politely, it just stops accepting mail.

Read the full pieceKeeping the mailbox secure without making it a choreMulti-factor authentication is the single biggest improvement most businesses can make to their email security, and the one most often put off. Read the full pieceWhat to do when the mailbox is full, and how to stop it happening againA full mailbox stops mail arriving, usually at the worst possible moment. Clearing it is the easy part. Keeping it clear is the bit worth setting up once.

Where to start

If you do one thing, check that your email is arriving. It is the least visible item on this list and the most damaging when it is wrong, because nothing tells you it is happening. Everything else on this page improves something you can already see.

After that, work in the order your customers experience it. Being easy to reach comes before being organised about what arrives, because there is no point getting good at handling enquiries you never receive.