Five places information gets stuck between your tools

Most businesses do not have an information problem. They have five of them, in the same five places, and they are so familiar that nobody sees them as problems at all — just as the way things are.

Here they are, in the order they usually appear, with what actually fixes each.

1. The website form

A visitor fills in the form. The form sends an email. The email goes to info@. And that is the whole system.

What goes wrong: the email is read by whoever gets there first, or by nobody, because everyone assumes someone else has. There is no record that the enquiry existed, so nobody can say how many arrived last month. If the person who usually handles them is away, the enquiries simply pile up unnoticed.

What fixes it: the form should create a record, not just send a message. Something with a status, an owner and a date, so an enquiry that nobody has answered is visibly an enquiry that nobody has answered. The email can still go out — it just stops being the only evidence.

2. The shared inbox

The shared inbox is where information goes to become invisible. A thread contains the agreed price, the delivery date and a change the customer asked for on a Thursday — and none of that exists anywhere else. Six months later, when there is a dispute or simply a question, somebody spends forty minutes searching for a message they half remember.

What fixes it: not a better inbox. Decide which few facts must live outside email — the agreed price, the scope, the dates, the decisions — and make sure those land somewhere durable at the moment they are agreed. The conversation can stay in the inbox. The commitments cannot.

3. The spreadsheet

Every business has one, and it is usually load-bearing. It started as a list and became the system of record for something important: stock, bookings, commissions, who has paid.

Spreadsheets are genuinely good, which is why this is delicate. They fail in a specific way: two people open it, one saves over the other, and nobody notices for a week. Or the formula in row 400 was never copied down. Or it is on one laptop.

What fixes it: not always a migration. Ask two questions — does more than one person edit it, and would a silent error cost real money? Two yeses means it has outgrown the format. One yes usually means it needs a backup and a rule about who edits, not a project.

4. The WhatsApp thread

Across Ghana and West Africa this is where the real conversation happens. The enquiry, the negotiation, the photograph of the product, the agreement, the payment confirmation — all of it in a thread on somebody's personal phone.

The problem is not WhatsApp. WhatsApp is working exactly as intended and it is where your customers are. The problem is that the business has no access to what happened there. When that person is unavailable, ill or leaves, the relationship leaves with them.

What fixes it: use a business account rather than a personal one so the history belongs to the business; agree what gets recorded elsewhere (who, what was agreed, what happens next); and where the volume justifies it, connect it so that a conversation can create the same kind of record the website form does.

5. The CRM nobody updates

The most expensive of the five, because someone paid for it. It was bought to solve exactly these problems. Six months on it contains the customers imported on day one and nothing since.

CRMs are not abandoned because people are lazy. They are abandoned because updating one is work that benefits somebody else — the person typing gets nothing out of it, and the report it feeds is read by a manager. Any system that asks people to do extra work for someone else's benefit will lose to the path of least resistance every time.

What fixes it: reduce the typing to near zero. The record should be created by the thing that already happened — the form, the message, the payment — not by a person retelling it. A CRM that fills itself gets used. A CRM that asks gets ignored.

Information does not get stuck because people are careless. It gets stuck wherever keeping it costs somebody time and saves somebody else time.

Where to start

Do not attempt all five. Follow one customer through your business, from first contact to invoice, and write down every point where a human being retypes something that already exists in digital form. Retyping is the tell. Fix the most frequent one, watch it for a month, and then look again — the second one is usually easier, and by then you will know which of the five was actually costing you.