The Customer Question Bank

It's the same twelve questions. It's always the same twelve.

How much is it. How long does it take. Do you cover my area. What's included. Can you do it before Christmas. Do I have to be in. What if I don't like it. How do I pay.

You've answered these hundreds of times. Every single time, you've written the answer out fresh — slightly differently, from memory, usually while doing something else.

And because it's only two minutes each time, it never feels like a problem worth solving.

Two minutes, six times a week, is over 10 hours a year — spent typing things you already know.

The hours aren't even the worst of it. Because you're answering from memory each time, the answers drift. The price you quote in a rush isn't quite the price on your website. The timescale you give when you're busy isn't the one you give when you're quiet.

Nobody's lying. There just isn't a fixed answer anywhere, so every reply is a fresh improvisation.

How to do it

Harvest

From real messages,
not memory.

Answer once

Properly. The version
you'd stand by.

Put it to work

Four places, and
they compound.

Harvest, don't invent

Do not sit down and think up the questions. You'll write the ones you wish people asked, and miss the awkward ones they actually do.

Open your last thirty real enquiries — email, WhatsApp, Instagram DMs, the contact form. Copy them out. That's the raw material, and it's the whole difference between a useful bank and a generic FAQ nobody reads.

The prompt

Paste your thirty enquiries, then this underneath.

These are real enquiries my business has received.

Pull out every question being asked, including the ones asked indirectly — "I was wondering about pricing" is the question "how much is it".

Group them so near-identical questions become one. For each, tell me how many times it came up and give me the two or three different ways people phrase it.

Sort by how often it's asked.

Then flag separately:

1. Any question that suggests they're worried about something, rather than just gathering facts

2. Any question that shouldn't need asking, because it should be obvious from my website

3. Anything asked only once or twice that struck you as a good question

Use their words, not marketing language.

Flag 1 is the valuable one — "how do I know you'll turn up" isn't a request for information, it's a worry. Worries lose you jobs silently, because nobody says "I didn't book you because I wasn't sure I could trust you." Once you can see them written down, you can answer them before they're asked.

Flag 2 is free money — every question that shouldn't need asking is a hole in your website charging you an email each time. Fix the page and the question stops arriving. That's the only fix here that reduces the work rather than speeding it up.

Answering properly

This is the hour that matters. Write each one as if it's the last time.

01 · Give a real number

Why it matters — "it depends" is the most expensive phrase in small business. It depends on things you already know, so give the range and say what moves it: "Between £400 and £900 — depends mostly on the size of the room and whether it needs stripping first." Nobody was ever put off by a range. Plenty are put off by evasion.

02 · Answer the worry, not just the question

Why it matters — "do I need to be in?" usually means "I don't know you and I'm uneasy about strangers in my house." Answer the surface question and you've answered nothing. Say how it works, who'll be there, and what happens if they're not — and you've dealt with the actual objection.

03 · Write it once, at your best

Why it matters — the whole point is that this version is better than the one you'd type on a Thursday evening with a customer waiting. Take the extra two minutes now; it gets used a hundred times. This is the only part of the exercise where being slow is correct.

04 · Say the awkward things too

Why it matters — what you don't do, where you won't travel, the minimum job you'll take. It feels like turning work away. It isn't — it's turning away the enquiries that were never going to convert, before they cost you an hour each. Being clear about what you don't do is the cheapest filter you'll ever build.

Four places to use it

1 Replying to enquiries

Paste the bank into any AI chat above the enquiry and ask it to reply using your answers. It'll pick the right ones and put them in order. Two minutes becomes twenty seconds.

2 Your website

The top ten, in their words as questions. Not a marketing FAQ — the real ones. This is the fix that makes questions stop arriving instead of just answering them faster.

3 Anyone who answers your phone

Staff, a partner, whoever picks up when you can't. They now give your answer instead of a guess — usually the difference between a booking and a "he'll call you back".

4 Content, without thinking of ideas

Every question is a post. You already know they're the things customers care about, because customers asked them. Twelve questions is three months of content you don't have to invent.

Add the new one every time

When someone asks something that isn't in the bank, add it — with the answer you just gave. Thirty seconds, while it's fresh.

Within a few months you'll have something no template or consultant could have produced, because it's built entirely from what your customers actually wanted to know.

And a question that keeps arriving despite being answered on your website is telling you something specific: people aren't finding that page. That's a different problem, and now you can see it.

You're not writing an FAQ. You're writing down what you already know, in one place, at your best.

The knowledge was always there. It just lived in your head and got retyped, slightly differently, several hundred times.

Where this goes next

Once the bank exists, an obvious thought tends to follow: if the answers are all written down, does someone need to be me to give them?

That's the right question, and it's how something that answers enquiries automatically gets built — but the bank has to come first. Every enquiry system that fails, fails because nobody wrote the answers down properly before automating them.

Do the hour. It's useful on its own, and it's the thing everything else needs.