Lead Response Time: How to Measure Yours and Reply Faster Without Living on Your Phone

See what slow replies costDownload the lead response time log (PDF)

What lead response time means

Lead response time is the gap between an enquiry arriving and the person getting a first useful reply. "Useful" matters: an automatic "we got your message" is welcome, but it does not answer the question, give a price or offer a time. Measure to the first reply that does.

The reason to care is simple. The person who enquired is usually asking more than one business, and the conversation that starts first has an advantage. The authors of The Short Life of Online Sales Leads in Harvard Business Review found that most companies were not responding to online enquiries nearly fast enough. You do not need their exact figures to act on that; you need your own.

How to measure it with twenty enquiries

The video above shows a Leads list, where every enquiry carries the time it arrived. You can do the same thing on paper; the log sheet with this post has twenty rows.

1. Pull twenty recent enquiries

Take the last twenty from every channel together: calls, voicemails, web forms, emails and social messages. Twenty is enough to see a pattern and small enough to finish in half an hour.

2. Write down two times for each

When it arrived, and when the person got a first useful reply. For calls answered live the wait is zero. For a voicemail, it is the time until you called back and actually spoke.

3. Take the median, not the average

Sort the twenty waits from shortest to longest. With twenty values, the median is halfway between the 10th and 11th. A single enquiry that sat for three days over a holiday weekend will drag an average up a long way, while the median shows what a typical customer experiences. Keep the longest wait as a second number; it tells you about the worst case.

4. Set a target per channel

A plumber who is on jobs all day cannot promise a five-minute reply to a web form, and should not pretend to. A realistic target might be: calls returned within an hour, forms and emails answered the same working day. Write it down.

5. Add an instant acknowledgement

An automatic reply that says the enquiry arrived, when a person will answer, and where to book a time fills the gap before your real reply. In Gmail, the vacation responder can do this during set dates; Google notes that in most cases it is only sent the first time someone writes to you.

6. Measure again in a month

Same twenty-enquiry method, same definition of a useful reply. Compare the medians.

A worked example

A landscaping business logs twenty enquiries. Seven were calls answered live (0 minutes). The other thirteen, in minutes: 20, 35, 45, 60, 90, 120, 180, 240, 300, 480, 600, 1,500 and 4,300, the last being a form that arrived on a Friday evening and was answered on Monday.

Sorted, the 10th and 11th values are 45 and 60, so the median wait is about 53 minutes. The average is about 399 minutes, over six and a half hours, mostly because of that one weekend form and a next-day reply. Both numbers are true; the median says the typical customer waits under an hour, the average says the business has a weekend problem. The fix for the second is an acknowledgement with a booking link, not faster afternoons.

To see what slow replies cost, count every enquiry answered after the person had moved on as a miss and use the missed call cost calculator. Our guide to measuring your missed call rate explains how to sort enquiries into answered and missed with the same rules each month.

Four measuring mistakes

1. Measuring to the auto-reply. An automatic acknowledgement arrives in seconds, so counting it makes every business look fast. Measure to the first reply that answers the question or offers a time.
2. Only counting one channel. Calls are usually the quickest channel because someone hears them ring. Forms and social messages are where enquiries wait. Mix all channels in the twenty.
3. Using business hours only. It is tempting to stop the clock at closing time. Your customer's clock does not stop; a form sent at 7pm and answered at 9am waited fourteen hours from their side. Record real times, then decide separately whether the overnight wait matters for your trade.
4. Measuring once. One month is a snapshot. The value is in the second and third measurement, after you change something, with exactly the same rules.

It also helps to note in the log whether each enquiry became a customer. Twenty rows will not prove anything statistically, but if every job you won had a reply inside an hour and every slow reply went nowhere, that pattern is worth acting on.

Five changes that shorten it

1. One place for every enquiry. Replies are slow when enquiries are spread across a phone, two inboxes and three messaging apps. Choose one place you check, and forward everything there.
2. Fixed check-in times. If you cannot watch your phone all day, check at set times, for example 10am, 1pm and 4pm, and tell people that in your acknowledgement.
3. A booking link in every first reply. Many enquiries end in "when can you come?". Letting the person pick a time removes a round of messages.
4. Saved replies for common questions. Price ranges, areas you cover, how soon you can start. Typing the same answer every time is slow.
5. A weekend rule. Either someone checks once on Saturday and Sunday, or the acknowledgement says plainly when you will reply.

In Fynl, form and website chat enquiries land in the Leads list shown in the video, your Gmail inbox sits in the same portal, and on the Agency plan an automation can email every new enquiry back within minutes. It does not answer calls or send texts, so a phone plan is still needed alongside it.

Every enquiry you answer faster is worth more if the follow-up is easy; our free tools include a form builder and a booking page.

Questions people also ask

Sources

• Harvard Business Review — The Short Life of Online Sales Leads (2011)
• Gmail Help — Send an automatic reply when you're out of office