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Format A: Regular Enquiry

1. General description

  • The Regular Enquiry process is the default full client lifecycle used when a website enquiry is handled as a standard legal or professional matter in BackOffice, without being pre-flagged as Paid Consultation only and without using a pre-packaged Direct Service strategy.
  • It covers the journey from website or AI receptionist intake, through admin triage and assignment, professional contact and quotation, ongoing case management and payment declaration, to completion, survey handling and GDPR-driven anonymisation or deletion.
  • A Regular Enquiry is first created when a validated website form submission is mapped to an Enquiry Type and country in the Laravel layer and a client record is opened in BackOffice with status New Enquiry.
  • Admin confirms that the lead is correctly classified and, via autoassign or manual routing, ensures that an appropriate professional is assigned.
  • The assigned User is then responsible for contacting the client, completing a Strategy Guide, sending written offers where appropriate, and progressing the case through statuses such as Created Lead, In Progress and Waiting for Response until it reaches a final outcome.
  • Regular Enquiries are deliberately used for higher-value or more complex matters because they consume significant professional time, typically involving structured calls or video meetings combined with tailored written proposals.
  • Admin therefore assesses each incoming lead to decide whether it warrants the Regular Enquiry flow, taking into account the client’s apparent seriousness, the likely value of the matter and the availability of a suitable professional.
  • Leads that do not justify this level of engagement may instead be handled as Paid Consultations, Direct Services or may be eliminated quickly.
  • Within the Advocate Abroad ecosystem, Regular Enquiries depend on coordinated behaviour across the Website, Laravel and BackOffice platforms.
  • The Website is responsible for capturing and validating client data, Laravel for routing form endpoints to Enquiry Types and countries and applying configuration rules, and BackOffice for operational handling of statuses, communication history, payments, recurring-service flags and GDPR workflows.
  • Regular Enquiries form the baseline against which specialised flows such as Direct Service offers, Paid Consultation-only engagements and recurring principal or delegatee records are defined.

2. Business goals & objectives

  • Convert every valid, serious website submission into a single BackOffice client record with the correct Enquiry Type, country and initial status so that no qualified enquiry is lost or duplicated.
  • Route each Regular Enquiry to an appropriate professional using configured routing rules for Enquiry Type, country, profession, language coverage, availability, capacity and performance, while clearly flagging failures as NPD cases that require admin action.
  • Enforce a status-driven lifecycle, typically moving from New Enquiry to Created Lead to In Progress or Waiting for Response and then to Completed and Closed or to Eliminated, Rejected or Unsuitable, with popups enforcing elimination reasons and completion or payment confirmation where required.
  • Maintain accurate, auditable financial information in the Payments tab so that invoices, internal commission statements and partner settlements can be generated automatically and reconciled against the work performed.
  • Provide a complete audit trail in the Updates Record, capturing status changes, Enquiry Type changes, assignment and NPD events, payments, admin overrides and other key actions, to support quality assurance, dispute resolution and reporting.
  • Enable GDPR-compliant data retention by ensuring that once Regular Enquiries become inactive and reach configured age thresholds, anonymisation and deletion jobs can run reliably, leaving only non-identifying statistics.
  • Protect professional time and network reputation by steering only serious and properly scoped matters into the Regular Enquiry flow and by offering clear mechanisms to eliminate, freeze or re-route cases that are not progressing.

3. Detailed behaviour & step-by-step flow

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3.1 Website submission & record creation

  • The client completes a service form on the Advocate Abroad website for a specific service category such as Property Purchase, Divorce, Tax, Immigration, Business Formation or Administrative procedures.
  • The website validates required fields, such as name, email, phone, enquiry text and consent, and posts the data to a dedicated form endpoint configured in the Laravel admin system.
  • Laravel maps the submission URL and payload to an Enquiry Type and country using its routing table, and this mapping is first confirmed in the staging environment by submitting test enquiries and verifying that the resulting BackOffice records show the expected Enquiry Type, jurisdiction and initial status.
  • BackOffice creates a new client record with the standard tab layout: Overview, Enquiry Details, Strategy Guide, Emails, Messages, Documents, Payments, Additional Services, Tasks, GDPR and Updates Record.
  • The new record’s status is set to New Enquiry, the Enquiry Type and country fields are populated, the original enquiry text appears in Enquiry Details, and the Enquiry Date and initial Last Activity Date are stored.
  • If autoassign can immediately select a professional, the Assigned User field is also populated at this point.

3.2 Autoassignment & NPD handling

  • There is currently no fully implemented or trusted automatic lead assignment in production; any assignment that appears in BackOffice has been made manually by an Admin (or equivalent) choosing an Assigned User and saving the record.
  • Laravel can compute a suggested assignee (candidate professional) for a lead based on routing configuration, but this suggestion is advisory only, is not automatically applied, and is considered deficient and not reliable for operational use.
  • All leads that are not explicitly assigned by a human must be treated as effectively unassigned; NPD states (e.g. NPD – Awaiting Assignment) are used to make these cases visible in NPD-focused admin views rather than leaving them silently orphaned.
  • Admin assigns leads manually from the Overview tab by choosing an Assigned User from the dropdown; confirmation popups may highlight issues such as assigning to a user who is Out of Office and can offer options such as extending NPD deadlines or sending immediate notifications.
  • Any references in this document or the Wiki to autoassign describe planned or intended future behaviour only; for current reality, wording should be interpreted as “Laravel proposes a suggested assignee; Admin must confirm or override and save the assignment manually in BackOffice.”

3.3 User contact & Strategy Guide (Created Lead)

  • The assigned professional is expected to contact the client promptly, typically by telephone as the first channel and then by email if calls are unsuccessful or if the client prefers written communication.
  • Call results and first-contact attempts may trigger standard “we tried to reach you” messages, and the All Actions workflow can automatically record outcomes such as non-answer, another person answering, or phone issues, often combined with follow-up emails.
  • In the Strategy Guide tab, the user selects an appropriate strategy and quotation profile for the Enquiry Type, customises questions and proposals, and records key information that will later appear in offer or consultation emails.
  • Changing the main status from New Enquiry to Created Lead generally requires confirmation that a Strategy Guide exists or that a suitable quotation or plan has been prepared, and Created Lead indicates that the enquiry has been qualified and that a concrete proposal can be presented to the client.
  • From Created Lead, the professional can send an offer or quotation email using the Strategy Guide content, specifying the scope of services, fees, payment structure and next steps, and this email forms the basis for deciding whether the case continues as a full Regular Enquiry, a Paid Consultation-only engagement, a Direct Service, or is later eliminated.

3.4 Work phase (In Progress & Waiting for Response)

  • Once the client confirms that they wish to proceed, the user sets the status to In Progress and begins substantive work, adding short notes to the Updates Record to summarise important conversations, milestones and decisions.
  • If the main action is now on the client or on a third party, such as waiting for documents, a decision or an external authority, the user sets the status to Waiting for Response and uses the Next Progress Date field to indicate when the case should be reviewed again.
  • System reminders and admin monitoring often rely on Waiting for Response combined with Next Progress Date to identify cases where no follow-up has occurred on schedule, and those rules interact with Expired and NPD processes when no updates are recorded.
  • Throughout the work phase, emails, internal messages, documents and tasks are attached to the client record so that the full context of the Regular Enquiry remains visible to both the professional and admin.

3.5 Payments, completion & closure

  • When the client pays fees, whether for consultations, fixed-fee work or ongoing services, the professional records each payment in the Payments tab, including amount, method, date and any relevant notes, and associates it with the correct part of the work.
  • The system aggregates payments and applies Enquiry Type and role-based rules to calculate Advocate Abroad’s commission and any referral or delegatee shares, and these figures are later used to generate invoices, professional statements and payout summaries.
  • When the professional considers the work complete, they change the status to Completed; a completion popup asks for confirmation of the total fees received and compares the figure against declared payments, issuing warnings if there is a mismatch so that the user can correct the record.
  • Completed cases appear in admin review queues such as Daily Updates, where admin verifies payments, checks whether surveys or feedback emails should be sent and ensures that the record is ready to be finalised.
  • After any necessary admin review, the status is set to Closed, indicating that the Regular Enquiry is fully finished; at this point, any remaining survey or feedback emails are sent if they have not already been triggered, and the record begins moving towards anonymisation according to GDPR settings.

3.6 Elimination & inactivity-driven outcomes

  • If the client clearly does not wish to proceed, chooses another provider, remains unresponsive despite repeated chasers or the service is outside scope, the user changes the status to an appropriate eliminating outcome such as Eliminated, Rejected or Unsuitable.
  • When the status is changed to an eliminating outcome, a reason popup requires the user to choose or enter a clear justification, and this information supports analytics on lost leads and ensures that automated follow-ups are stopped immediately.
  • Leads that remain in NPD – Awaiting Assignment or in similar inactive states for longer than configured thresholds are surfaced to admin in specific views and summary emails so that they can be assigned, eliminated, frozen or otherwise resolved rather than remaining indefinitely unhandled.
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