Set up a 24/7 inquiry concierge that answers while you sleep

What you are building, and where the line is

An inquiry concierge is your AskEleven Employee standing at the front desk of your inbox around the clock: reading every email and website form submission as it arrives, answering what can be answered accurately from facts you have approved, asking the qualifying questions a good front-of-house person would ask, and booking the serious inquiries straight onto your calendar. The midnight guest gets the same answer the noon guest gets, only faster.

The line you draw at the start is what makes this safe. The concierge answers questions of fact: rates, availability, policies, directions, what is included. It never invents an answer it does not have, never negotiates, never promises an exception, and never confirms anything the calendar does not show. Everything outside those lines gets a warm holding reply and a message to you. You will write these rules down once, in the prompts below, and they hold at 3am exactly as written - which is more than can be said for a tired human.

Setup is three steps and a shadow week. Budget one focused session for the setup and ten minutes a day, for two weeks, reading transcripts.

Before you start: gather four things

Your real questions. Not the FAQ you think you should have - the questions people actually ask. The best source is your own sent mail: the last six months of replies to inquiries. If your Employee is connected to your Gmail or Outlook, it can mine this itself in step 1; connect the inbox first from your AskEleven dashboard.
The facts file. Hours, rates or fee ranges and how you quote, deposit and cancellation policies, parking, accessibility, what is and is not included - every answer you are happy to give in writing, in one document. Include the questions you deliberately do not answer by email ("wedding pricing is quoted by phone only") so the concierge knows to hold rather than guess.
Your availability source. The calendar that tells the truth: Google Calendar, Calendly, OpenTable, your booking system. Decide what the concierge may book directly (a 20-minute intro call, a table for four) and what it may only hold pending your confirmation (a full buyout, a new engagement).
The escalation list. The situations that must reach a human regardless of hour: complaints, press, anything legal, any inquiry above a value you set. For each one, who gets told and how - an email, a text, or both.

Step 1: Teach it your answers

First, turn your own history into the concierge's knowledge. Paste this with your inbox connected:

Prompt 1 of 2 - mine the history

Go through the inquiries we have received by email and through the website form over the last six months, along with my replies. Build two lists. First: the twenty questions we are asked most often, ranked, each with the best answer I actually sent, quoted word for word. Second: every question where my replies contradict each other, or where I clearly did not have a good answer. Do not write any new answers yet. I want to see what we actually say before deciding what we should say.

What to expect: the ranked list is usually a surprise. The question you answer most is rarely the one you would have guessed, and the contradictions list is quietly humbling - most businesses discover they have quoted the same policy three different ways. Now consolidate:

Prompt 2 of 2 - the answer file

Combine those lists with the facts document I have shared into a single answer file: every question we can answer by email, with one approved answer each, written in my voice as you find it in my sent replies. Where my past replies contradicted each other, choose the better answer and flag it for my review. End with a section titled "Never answer, always hold" containing: anything involving a complaint, press or media, legal matters, discounts or price negotiation, and [anything else on your list]. This file is your only source of answers. If a question is not covered in it, you do not know the answer.

What to expect: a document you should read once, line by line, with a pen. Every answer in it will eventually be sent under your name. Ten minutes of editing here is the whole ballgame.

Step 2: The standing instructions

Now the rules of engagement - the prompt that turns an assistant into a concierge:

Prompt - standing instructions

From now on, handle every new inquiry that arrives by email or through the website form, at any hour, as follows. Reply within ten minutes. Answer only from the answer file; if the answer is not there, send the holding reply - "Thank you for reaching out. That is one for [MY NAME], who will come back to you by [next business morning]" - and forward the inquiry to me. Never invent, estimate, or negotiate. Match the length and warmth of my own replies: two short paragraphs, no bullet points, signed [SIGN-OFF]. If an inquiry is a complaint, mentions a lawyer, or comes from a journalist, do not reply at all - text me immediately and wait. Every morning at 7am, send me a summary of the night: who wrote, what they asked, what you answered, and anything waiting on me.

What to expect: confirmation of the rules played back to you, and then a quieter inbox that is somehow producing more booked calls. The ten-minute reply window is deliberate: fast enough to win the race, slow enough that a submission with an obvious typo or a double-send gets treated sensibly rather than instantly. The morning summary becomes the pulse of the whole system - three minutes of reading that replaces an evening of triage.

Step 3: Qualification and booking

Answering is half the job. The other half is moving the serious inquiries forward without you in the loop:

Prompt - qualify and book

When an inquiry is a potential booking or new engagement, do more than answer. Ask for the missing details naturally in your reply - for us that is [date, party size, and occasion]. An inquiry is qualified when [the date is open on our calendar and the request is within our capacity - state your own test]. For qualified inquiries, offer my Calendly link for a call, or book directly on the calendar where our rules allow it, and confirm the booking in the same email. Log every inquiry in HubSpot as a contact, with a note on what they asked and where things stand. If a qualified inquiry goes three days without a reply, send one graceful follow-up, then leave them be.

What to expect: replies that end with a next step instead of a full stop. The qualification questions matter more than they look: an inquiry that answers "forty guests, the second Saturday of June, a rehearsal dinner" has told you everything, and it costs the writer nothing because the questions were asked conversationally. The HubSpot log means nothing lives only in an email thread - every inquiry has a record, a status, and a history you can see at a glance.

A worked example: Friday, 9:40pm

A boutique inn, twelve rooms. At 9:40 on a Friday night the website form delivers: "Hi - do you have anything the weekend of the 14th? We would be bringing our dog, and we probably could not get there before 10pm on the Friday."

The concierge checks the calendar: one garden room open that weekend. The answer file covers both questions - dogs are welcome in the garden rooms at $40 per stay, and self check-in runs after 9pm with a code sent the morning of arrival. At 9:46 the reply goes out: three sentences confirming the room, the dog, and the late arrival, ending with a link to book the garden room and a note that it is the last one open that weekend. The guest books at 10:15, from the sofa, decision made.

Saturday's 7am summary reads: "1 inquiry overnight - garden room booked for the 14th (2 guests, 1 dog, late Friday arrival). Nothing waiting on you." Without the concierge, this inquiry sits until Monday morning - by which time a competitor with a faster front desk has the booking, and nobody ever knows it was lost.

Quality tests before you hand over the nights

Run these before the concierge sends a single unsupervised reply:

The shadow week. Start in draft mode: "For the next week, prepare every reply but hold it for my approval instead of sending." Most drafts you will approve untouched. The ones you edit are the remaining teaching material - tell it what was wrong in one sentence, and have it update the answer file to match.
The invention test. Email yourself, from a personal address, a question the answer file does not cover. The only correct response is the holding reply. If the concierge improvises an answer, tighten the standing instructions and test again - this is the one failure you never accept.
The escalation drill. Send a fake complaint from an address it does not know. You should get the text, and the sender should get silence. Test the journalist rule the same way.
The voice test. Put three concierge replies and three of your own in front of someone who knows how you write. If they can sort them reliably, the voice needs another pass against your sent mail.

Going live, and the first two weeks

When the shadow week produces a day of drafts you did not touch, switch off draft mode and let it send. For the first two weeks, read every transcript daily - it is ten minutes with coffee, and every correction you make is one you will never have to make again. The concierge treats each piece of feedback as a permanent rule, which is the difference between training a system and managing a person.

The signal to stop reading everything is a full week without an edit. Drop to a weekly spot-check after that, and keep two habits for the life of the system: when a rate, policy, or menu changes, the answer file changes the same day, and once a quarter, re-run the mining prompt from step 1 to catch the new questions your business has started attracting. The answer file is a living document; the concierge is only ever as current as it is.

From here on, the Friday 9pm inquiry is not the one you lose. It is the one you answer best.