How to find out your actual average response time in 15 minutes
You cannot improve a number you have never measured. Response time is one of those metrics that gets estimated rather than calculated, and the estimate is almost always more flattering than the reality.
Here is how to get the actual number.
Step 1: pick your channel
Start with whichever channel generates the most enquiries for your business. The website contact form and email are the most common starting points. If it is phone calls, you are looking at missed call logs rather than message threads, but the principle is the same.
Step 2: pull 20 recent enquiries
Go back far enough to find 20 enquiries that received a reply. Skip any that never got a response, though noting how many there are is itself useful.
Step 3: record the timestamps
For each enquiry, find two timestamps: when it arrived, and when you sent your first reply. Your email client, CRM, or phone message history will show both. You are not looking for anything precise, just the gap in minutes or hours.
Step 4: calculate the gap
Subtract the arrival time from the reply time for each one. Write the result down. You are not worried about outliers yet; you are building a picture of your typical behaviour.
Step 5: average it
Add up all 20 gaps and divide by 20. That is your number.
What to do with it
Under five minutes: you are ahead of almost every competitor in your market. The focus now is consistency, not speed. Check whether the number holds up on evenings and weekends, which is where most businesses lose ground.
Five minutes to one hour: there is meaningful conversion upside available. The enquiries that arrived while you were on a job or in a meeting are almost certainly the main source of loss. That is a system problem, not a time problem.
Over one hour: this is costing you jobs. Response time research is clear that leads contacted after 30 minutes convert at roughly 1% of the rate of leads contacted within five. Fixing this is the single highest-return activity available to the business right now.
One number. 15 minutes to find it. Worth knowing before you spend another pound on marketing.
If your number came back over an hour and you want to understand what fixing it looks like in practice, book a free discovery call with EveryCatch. We will walk through your setup and show you where the gap is.
