Managing the process
The first and most important thing to manage in this process is to ensure that it is working. You cannot assume this is the case.
Where enquiries are converted into email and transmitted via the email system they inevitably pass through spam filters. Contact form information looks very similar to junk email; it comes from a computer (the web server), not a person, and it contains fields, not nice paragraphs of text. I have seen many cases in which some, or all, enquiries were being treated as junk and lost. It's harder to discover when only some enquiries are junked, not all of them. If you suddenly stop getting any enquiries from the web you'll probably notice. If only some are being junked you may not.
I recently worked with a client that had 75 percent of its enquiries being junked. This had been happening for two years, but no one had noticed; they just thought they got less enquiries than they actually did. In this client's case we estimated a loss of potential business worth around 20 percent of total turnover. We found a fortune in lost business sitting inside Outlook's junk email folder.
I worked with a travel business in which most enquiries came from tour operators, not the company's own website. All of their online enquiries had been junked by Outlook for six months before it was discovered.
You have to ask why no one noticed the website had completely stopped generating enquiries. This brings us to a related issue: who gets the enquiries. In the case of the tour operator, the enquiries came to the sales office receptionist. The logic was that since the receptionist takes the telephone calls and distributes them to the sales staff according to the nature of the enquiry, the receptionist should do the same with the email enquiries. The problem was that in this organization the receptionist was the lowest paid, least capable person in the office. When the email enquiries ceased to arrive, she noticed, but didn't think to tell anyone.
Situations in which the enquiries are going into a CRM system are not guaranteed to work perfectly either. I worked with an international training company that uses ACT and WebGrabber. WebGrabber has to be programmed to understand the format of the email and told which field in ACT each item in the email corresponds (or "maps") to. Setting up these correspondences is called "mapping." Any process that places form data into a software system requires mapping of the form elements to the fields in the software. If the form changes, or the fields in the software change, the mapping becomes invalid. Once the mapping is invalid the enquiries either stop being imported at all, or some fields stop being imported.
In the case of the training company, changes in the contact form meant that certain types of enquiry couldn't be handled by WebGrabber and were being lost. As we all know, computers hate us and will seize any opportunity to hit us where it hurts, so the lost enquiries were, of course, the most valuable ones.
There are a number of steps that can be taken to avoid these scenarios. First, we need to record the fact that someone filled in the form. The easiest way to do this is to have a separate "Thank You" page that is shown when the server gets the data. With tracking code in the Thank You page we can count how many enquiries should have been received. Some sites change the content of the page when the form is submitted but keep the same URL. This is of no use; you can't tell if the form was submitted that way.
Once you can count submissions you can start to manage and improve the process. The first step is to compare the number of submissions with the number of enquiries actually received. The two numbers should match exactly. If they don't, something is wrong. If the number of submissions is higher than the number of enquiries received, enquiries are not getting through.
Once we know the enquiries are getting through we can look at getting more of them. If we can increase the percentage of visits that result in an enquiry we are getting more potential business from the same number of visitors. That's an improved return on investment -- more profit for the same outlay.