One enquiry workflow across Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley

The problem with serving more than one borough

This site's directories cover three boroughs: Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley, through neighbourhoods such as Lewisham, Catford, Eltham, Sidcup, Bexleyheath and Crayford. A business serving customers across them has a practical headache. Customers describe their location in many ways (a neighbourhood name, a postcode, a street, a nearby station) and rarely say the borough.

A single workflow can handle all this, provided it separates two jobs: working out where the enquiry is from, and deciding what to say. The first should rely on what the customer actually told you. The second is where an AI drafting tool can help.

The workflow, in six stages

1. Capture. All channels (form, email, messaging) land in one list. Each entry records the customer's own words about location, unedited.
2. Locate. A person, or a simple rule you wrote, sets a service-area tag: inside area, outside area, or unclear. Never infer the borough from a postcode district alone, as district and council boundaries do not match neatly.
3. Draft. For inside-area enquiries, the assistant drafts a reply from your approved template. For unclear ones, the draft only asks where the job is.
4. Review. A person reads and edits the draft.
5. Send. The person sends it; the assistant never does.
6. Log. The outcome is recorded: booked, declined, no reply.

Fictional example: Test Tiling Co

Fictional example. Names and messages are invented.

Imagine an invented tiling firm of three, taking work around the six neighbourhoods. Their list of areas is written in their own words: "Catford, Lewisham, Eltham, Sidcup, Bexleyheath, Crayford, and anywhere reasonable between."

Human checks

• A person confirms the area tag whenever the location was ambiguous.
• Prices and dates are never taken from a draft.
• Once a week, read ten drafts and mark any that stated something not in your own records.
• Strip names, phone numbers and full addresses from anything pasted into a tool, unless you have decided otherwise on purpose.

Acceptance checklist: the test pack

• Run twenty invented enquiries covering each of the six neighbourhoods, plus five outside your area and five unclear ones.
• Every enquiry gets the correct area tag or is held for a person.
• No draft claims you cover somewhere you have not listed.
• No draft contains a price, date or guarantee.
• The switch-off step works, and you can run the whole thing by hand for a day.

Measuring

Track three numbers weekly: time from enquiry to first reply, the number of enquiries tagged unclear, and the number of out-of-area enquiries you decline. A falling "unclear" count suggests your form is asking better questions. These are your own records and no result is promised.

Local context from the neighbourhood sites

The directory network publishes guides for each neighbourhood, linked below. They are from the same publisher as this page, so treat them as background reading, not independent confirmation of anything here.

Who wrote this, and how to ask

Dean Keating publishes this directory network from Horndean, Hampshire, and offers live remote AI business coaching, in which the client does the implementing. Installation is a separate service, scoped and quoted separately. This is an affiliated editorial resource, not an independent recommendation. Call 07810 666662 or WhatsApp 07418 627304; terms are agreed directly.