Stop losing jobs when you're unavailable.

Get more leads and win more work with three free WhatsApp Business features most tradespeople never turn on. Takes 10 minutes, costs nothing, no app to install.

Guides for tradespeople → Stop losing jobs when you're unavailable

What's in this guide

Why replying fast wins you more work, three free WhatsApp Business features that do it for you automatically, and a rough sense of what slow replies might actually be costing you.

The customer who messages you at 4pm rarely waits until you're free to call back

Enquiries don't pause while you're up a ladder. Most people message two or three tradespeople at once, and the job usually goes to whoever replies first, not whoever would've done the best work. A reply doesn't need to be a full answer, "got your message, I'll call you back after 5" is often enough to keep you in the running.

How to set it up, free, in about 10 minutes

You don't need new software for this. WhatsApp Business, the free app, not a paid tier, already has three features built in that most tradespeople never turn on:

  1. Greeting message. Open WhatsApp Business → Settings → Business tools → Greeting message. Turn it on, and it fires automatically the first time someone messages you, or after 14 days of silence. Keep it short: who you are, what you do, and that you'll reply properly as soon as you're off the tools.
  2. Away message. Same menu, just below Greeting message. Set it to your actual working hours (Settings → Business tools → Away message → Schedule) so it only fires outside them, not while you're genuinely free to reply.
  3. Quick replies. Save a couple of canned responses you can fire back in two taps, asking for a postcode, a quick description of the job, and a photo if it's something visual. Type / in a chat to pull one up instantly instead of typing the same questions out every time.

None of it is clever. It's just the difference between a customer hearing nothing for six hours and a customer hearing something in six seconds.

What slow replies actually cost

Research on this is consistent, if not exact, since every trade and area is different. As a rough guide, based on how response speed is generally found to affect whether a lead turns into a job:

Reply withinRoughly how it compares
Under 1 hourThe baseline, most likely to land the job
2 hours or moreAround 7x less likely to land it
24 hours or moreAround 60x less likely to land it
No reply at allRoughly 1 in 4 businesses, going by the study below

Illustrative, based on the cited study below, not a guarantee for any specific trade or job.

Source

Oldroyd, J., McElheran, K., & Elkington, D. (2011). The Short Life of Online Sales Leads. Harvard Business Review, March 2011. A study of 2,241 US companies, testing real response times against actual leads.

Qome cares about your business, not just your listing

A guide like this costs you nothing and needed no sign-up, that's deliberate. Qome Trade exists to back the rest of the business too, tax and compliance reminders that flag HMRC and Companies House dates before they become penalty letters, saved supplier accounts for Travis Perkins, Selco and the merchants you actually use, and a Business Log that tracks staff pay, materials and job profit in one place instead of three notebooks and a memory. The WhatsApp setup above works whether or not you ever join, we'd just like the chance to help with the rest of it too.

Want more ways to win work and get paid on time?

See all guides for tradespeople