A director messages on a Sunday. Funding has not landed, he has told nobody, he needs to reduce the team by a third, and he wants to know whether he can do it this week.
There is a great deal wrong with that question and none of it should be answered by anything other than a qualified person, quickly.
Myth 1: the enquiry can be triaged with process questions
Reality: it cannot. Asking which selection criteria are being used, or whether consultation has started, invites the enquirer to treat the answer as guidance. Capture the facts, book the call.
Myth 2: general information is harmless here
Reality: a general statement about consultation periods applied incorrectly to a specific situation causes real harm to real people. The only safe published content describes the service, not the law.
Myth 3: the employer has time
Reality: most redundancy enquiries arrive after the decision has been made in somebody's head and sometimes after it has been mentioned aloud. Speed of human contact is the entire value.
Myth 4: scale is a detail
Reality: it is the first thing that matters. How many people, over what period and in which locations determines which obligations apply, and it should be captured immediately.
Myth 5: it is only about the employer
Reality: employees' livelihoods are involved. A consultancy handling this well is protecting people as well as protecting a business, and that should be visible in how the enquiry is treated.
Myth 6: confidentiality is assumed
Reality: it has to be stated. Employers are frightened of information leaking before they have spoken to anybody, and saying plainly how enquiries are handled is what produces the contact.
Myth 7: a form is adequate
Reality: a form that sits unread until Tuesday loses the client and possibly worsens the situation. An immediate acknowledgement with a stated response time is the minimum.
Myth 8: these enquiries only come from large employers
Reality: the majority come from small businesses with no HR function at all, who have never done this before, which is the audience in HR help enquiries from small employers with a problem today adjacent territory.
What to capture
Number of employees affected, total headcount, locations, the intended timescale, whether anything has been communicated and whether anybody is on a fixed term or under notice already.
What to publish
The service, the stages, an indicative fee structure, how quickly you can start and that advice requires a conversation. Practical detail with no legal content.
Route it to a person immediately
Same day where possible, with a named adviser. This is not an enquiry that benefits from a nurture sequence.
Related matters arrive under pressure too
Disciplinary and grievance situations come through the same door, as in disciplinary and grievance enquiries from small employers, and the handling is described in redundancy process enquiries handled without advice.
The pattern is the same in every urgent professional service
Capture, escalate, never advise, as in claims enquiries that need a person straight away and the out of hours routing in an AI receptionist for veterinary clinics.
Getting started
Publish your service, stages and response time, then capture scale and timing at any hour with immediate escalation and no advice. SpideyChat for consultancies answers from your published pages. Try SpideyChat on your own site, or read about routing on the features page.