People say they contacted us through the website but we never got anything — what's happening?

This complaint arrives sideways — a patient mentions it at the front desk, a customer says "I filled out your form last month, never heard back" at a job site. The natural reaction is polite disbelief: our form works, we'd have seen it. Both things can be true. The form works; you never saw it.

How a working form loses submissions

Between Submit and your eyes sits a chain: the form plugin stores the entry → fires a notification email → through an email service → past spam filters → into a specific inbox → that a specific person checks. Every link can fail silently. The notification address belongs to an employee who left in 2023. The plugin update broke the email step but not the "Thanks!" screen. The notifications land in spam because the web host's mail server got blacklisted. The inbox is info@ and everyone assumed someone else had it. In every one of these, the customer sees a working form and you see nothing at all — there is no error screen for "the human was never told."

The five-minute test

Tonight, from your personal phone, fill out your own form as a customer would — realistic name, real question — and note the time. Then watch: Did anything arrive, anywhere, and when? Did the customer-you get any reply beyond the thank-you screen? Ask your team tomorrow if anyone saw it. One test submission maps the whole chain. If it arrived instantly and someone replied by morning, congratulations — now do it Saturday, because weekend behavior is usually a different animal.

Why this stays broken for years

Because every party sees health: the web company's dashboard shows submissions stored, the plugin shows green, your inbox shows its usual traffic, and the customers who'd testify otherwise book with competitors instead of calling to complain. In a live business we measure, even inquiries handled by actual staff lost a third to a missing next step — chains with no owner do worse. The only fix that lasts is making the flow someone's job and watching it with a number.

If the five-minute test fails

You've found real money. The free score sizes the leak from your own numbers, and the $500 discovery measures the full flow with timestamps — five days, different hours, weekend included — so the fix aims at the actual broken link instead of the whole chain.