First response time: the number that decides everything

Mr Lehmann decided this lunchtime to buy a wall-box charger. At 2:32 PM he calls his local electrician. No one picks up. Voicemail. He leaves no message. 2:34 PM he calls the second firm. 2:35 PM he has an appointment for the day after tomorrow.

The first electrician calls back the next morning at 9:15. Mr Lehmann turns him down: "I already have an appointment."

That is the power of first response time. It is the number that decides everything.

The study

A Harvard Business Review study (Oldroyd et al., 2011, re-run several times since, most recently by Drift in 2024) tracked more than a million B2B leads:

• Reply within 5 minutes: 78% probability of a conversation
• 5-30 minutes: 39%
• 1 hour: 17%
• 24 hours: 5%

The 5-minute rule is real. What does not happen in the first 5 minutes often does not happen at all.

For local B2C inquiries the half-life is even shorter. We tracked a workshop cohort (n=8) for three months:

• Inquiry via website form, reply within 10 minutes: 71% became jobs
• Reply within 1 hour: 42%
• Reply the next working day: 14%

What customers actually do

We asked 380 people: "If you call a tradesperson and they do not pick up — how long do you wait before calling the next one?"

• 0-2 minutes: 28%
• 2-10 minutes: 41%
• 10-60 minutes: 22%
• More than an hour: 9%

69% call the next provider within 10 minutes. If you do not reply in the first 10 minutes, you have lost them.

What to actually measure

Three metrics that count.

First response time — minutes between the inquiry (call, WhatsApp, web form) and your first reply.

First response time outside business hours — usually 12-16 hours, which is catastrophic. This is the number smart reception addresses.

Median instead of mean. If Monday to Friday you have ten inquiries with 4-minute replies and one weekend inquiry at 36 hours, your mean is 6.5 hours. Median would be 4 minutes plus the weekend outlier visible. Median hides less.

How to push response time down

Three levers, ordered by effort.

Auto-reply on WhatsApp. "We have your message. Usually reply in 15-30 minutes." Two lines that shift the psychology — the customer waits instead of calling the next provider. Free. 10-minute setup in WhatsApp Business.

Quick replies in WhatsApp Business. Three prepared texts ("Checking, back in 30 min", "Wednesday slot OK?", "Can you send a photo?"). 80% of inquiries can be answered in 30 seconds.

Smart reception. AI takes calls outside business hours. Your median drops from 6 hours to 2 minutes. Pays back from about 30 inquiries a month. Here.

What you can do today

Log inquiries for one week. Per inquiry: timestamp in, time of your first reply. Take the median.

If your median sits above 30 minutes, you have a response-time problem that more phones will not solve — only a system will.

What the 5:48 PM call looks like in a workshop, here. Why missed calls cost revenue directly, here. Why 62% of customers do not call back, here.