A message arrives at twenty five past eleven on a Wednesday. The event is in seven weeks, the venue is booked and almost nothing else is.
The message is long, slightly disorganised and contains four questions and an apology for the hour. It is written by somebody who has been staring at a spreadsheet since the children went to bed.
It is read at nine the following morning and answered at eleven. By then she has messaged two other planners, one of whom replied at half past eleven that night, and that planner now has the conversation.
The first failure: the enquiry arrives outside every working pattern
Personal event planning happens in the evening, and that is precisely when nobody in the industry is answering anything.
The second failure: the anxiety is not recognised
A message sent at half past eleven about a deadline in seven weeks is not a neutral enquiry, and a purely factual reply the next morning misreads it entirely.
The third failure: the reply is slower than the alternative
Clients contact several planners in the same session, and whoever answers first begins the relationship.
The fourth failure: the questions are not actually the question
Four specific questions frequently conceal one general one, which is whether this is still achievable, and nobody answers that.
The fifth failure: nothing establishes the basics
Date, numbers, venue status and budget, which is the intake problem in enquiries with a date and no brief at all.
The sixth failure: the urgency is not assessed
Seven weeks and seven months are different situations, and both arrive through the same form at the same speed.
The seventh failure: the planner's availability is not confirmed
The first thing that matters, and the last thing usually established, so a client waits two days to discover the date is not free.
The eighth failure: no immediate reassurance is offered
Saying that seven weeks is workable, if it is, is worth more at half past eleven than a detailed answer at eleven the next morning.
The ninth failure: the weekend version is worse
Saturday and Sunday enquiries wait until Monday, which is a three day gap on a decision being made that weekend.
The tenth failure: the coordination questions go unanswered
What a planner actually does and takes off them, which is the ground in supplier coordination questions clients ask about planners.
The eleventh failure: the pattern is never examined
Planners who look at when their enquiries actually arrive are usually surprised, and is the same discovery as why guesthouse enquiries arrive late at night.
The twelfth failure: the lost enquiry is invisible
She never replied to the eleven o'clock message, and nothing records that she was ever there.
The thirteenth failure: the planner sounds as tired as the client
A reply written at seven the next morning by somebody working through a backlog reads flatly, and a client already anxious reads flat as uninterested. The first few sentences carry more weight in this trade than in almost any other.
The fix: reply at half past eleven, warmly
An assistant that responds immediately, confirms whether the date is free, says plainly whether the timescale is workable, gathers the numbers and budget and offers a time to speak reaches somebody at the moment she is deciding rather than after she has decided. What people expect at that hour is set out in what customers expect at midnight. Start at try, see features, and the sector view sits under event planners.