SektorCepte · 2026-10-26
Quick Replies for the Five Questions of the Day
Price, are you open, do you come to this area, how long, and the deposit. Keep those five answers as short saved replies.
The same five questions arrive at the counter and on the phone. How much, are you open, do you come to this neighbourhood, how long does the job take, and do you ask for a deposit. Typing them again each time is tiring, and the sentence shifts a little every time. If one customer hears one hour and the next hears another, the shop sounds undecided. A quick reply is how those five answers stay short and the same. A saved text should not lie. If the answer changes, the text changes that day. Collecting more than five patterns hides the right one in a crowd.
1. Name the five questions
Give each reply a short name you can find. Price, hours, area, time, deposit. The name is not the text the customer sees. It is the label you search for in the list. The sentence that goes out stands apart. The price reply should not be a bare number. Do not write a number before the job has a name. Let it stand like this: write the job and the neighbourhood, add the measure if one is needed, and I will name the figure after that. The hours reply should say today's hours, and if you are shut today it should say that on its own line. The area reply should describe the round you actually drive, in one sentence, and say plainly what sits outside it. The time reply should give a range for the kind of job, not a promise of a fixed hour. The deposit reply should finish, in one sentence, when you ask for it and what it counts toward.
2. Ask for the missing piece
A quick reply should not fill in what you do not know. If a price question arrives with no job written, do not send the price pattern. Send the pattern that asks for the job and the neighbourhood. People send a photo and write "how much". A photo alone is not a measure. Ask for width, height, and neighbourhood. Cutting does not start until those three are in. "Are you open" is sometimes a request for a booking. Add to the hours pattern a line that asks which job they came for. Saying yes then does not make you think the day is already full. If the deposit question arrives before the job is accepted, write the rule and add that the date is not locked yet. The rule does not stand in for the appointment.
3. Keep the sentence short
A saved text should stay inside four lines. A long bubble gets closed on a phone. One hello, the actual answer, and one question if something is missing. Do not park the address, the tax number, the account, and a life story in the same reply. The account goes in a separate message once a deposit is accepted. The address goes once the job is clear. Piling all of it into the first bubble makes a person look in the wrong place. Spelling should be clean, because this text leaves many times a day and becomes the mouth of the shop. Do not use shouting capitals. Even on an urgent job the sentence stays calm. A calm sentence tells haste more accurately.
4. A second person should use the same pattern
If two people watch the phone, two languages appear. One says until noon, the other says until evening. The customer who reads both does not know which to trust. Write the patterns together. Keep the list in the quick replies on the phone, not in anyone's memory. When someone new starts, they read the five patterns once and do not invent their own sentence. If the price talk comes from your mouth, do not let an apprentice send the price pattern. That pattern stays with you. The apprentice can send hours and area. Dividing the work also divides the wrong figure before it goes out.
5. Change the text on the day the answer changes
Summer hours, a holiday, a new neighbourhood, a new duration. Open the pattern on the morning the answer changes. The old text will otherwise go out believed to be true. Once a week, read the five patterns aloud. Delete a sentence you would not say. Do not keep a pattern for a question nobody asks anymore. If a new question arrives every day, open a sixth pattern. Do not squeeze it into the five. A squeezed text gives every job half an answer. Deleting an unused pattern makes the right one faster to find. When you change phones, move the list to the new phone as well. If the right sentence stays on the old phone and gets invented again on the new one, the shop splits in two once more.
This evening, open the five patterns side by side. Read each one against today's answer. Fix the one that does not fit, on the spot. Tomorrow, when the same question arrives, the sentence that goes with one tap should be the sentence you would say today.