Count the clarification work, not every minute in the queue

A quotation can take two days to finish while involving only twenty minutes of staff effort. Another can be sent in an hour but require three people to reconstruct missing information. Treating both as one “time to quote” number can hide the problem a website project should solve.

For an illustrative catalogue team, record a small set of permitted recent examples. Note active preparation, clarification messages, waiting for an external answer and the final review. The purpose is to discover where a practical change might help, not to grade staff using incomplete logs.

Define a unit of work

Choose one enquiry as the unit, even if it produces several messages. Otherwise the same difficult request can be counted repeatedly as separate problems. Identify the product context that should have arrived with it and the information staff actually needed to obtain.

A follow-up question is not automatically waste. It may represent necessary commercial judgement. The avoidable work is a narrower category: asking for information already known to the customer and reasonably available at the original point of enquiry, or searching for context the system could have preserved.

Separate the categories

Imagine ten fictional enquiries required 40 minutes of product-identification work and 70 minutes of commercial review. A new catalogue feature may reduce the first category. It cannot responsibly claim all 110 minutes as its potential saving.

If a trial reduces identification work to 20 minutes, that is a 20-minute reduction for this sample and task. It is not evidence of a general revenue increase or a guaranteed annual return. Record sample size and other changes that may have influenced the comparison.

Look for work the official tool does not show

The unofficial spreadsheet may contain the missing relation between an enquiry and a document. Before removing it, find out what question it answers. A new dashboard that omits the same information simply moves the workaround elsewhere.

Ask the receiving team what they inspect before replying and what they distrust. Their explanation can reveal an issue that click counts and page visits will not show.

Choose a measure the project can affect

A focused catalogue improvement could be assessed by the proportion of requests with an identifiable product, the time spent resolving that identity and whether customers understand the request outcome. Keep the measurement proportionate to the project and avoid collecting unnecessary personal information.

Service choices and scope planning can help connect the evidence to a manageable first change.