Your reply time is a promise, and you are making it by accident

The worst thing I have found on an audit was a contact form that had been sending to an email address belonging to a bookkeeper who left in 2021. Two hundred and forty enquiries over about three years, all delivered, all technically working, none of them read by a living person. The owner had spent money on ads pointing at that page the entire time.

That one is unusual. What is not unusual, what is in fact nearly universal, is the softer version: the phone gets answered in two rings because it is loud and it demands something, the text gets seen at lunch, the website form goes to an inbox somebody opens on Thursdays, and the lead from the listing site sits there for two days because nobody has the app on their phone anymore.

Same business. Same person capable of doing the work. Four completely different experiences depending on which door the customer happened to walk through, and not one of those four speeds was ever decided by anyone.

The person enquiring is not shopping for you

This is the reframe that makes the rest of it make sense, and it stings a bit.

When someone fills in your form at nine at night, they are not choosing you and then waiting patiently. They are working through a problem. They have three tabs open. They have messaged two other people. You are not being evaluated on your website copy or your years in business, you are in a race you did not know had started, and the finish line is whoever gets back to them first with something useful.

There is a pile of research on this in other industries and the shape is always the same: the first response wins a wildly disproportionate share of the work. I am not going to quote a specific percentage at you, because the studies are mostly about software sales and I have no idea whether the numbers transfer to a domestic boiler replacement. But you already know it is true from the other side of it. Think about the last time you needed a tradesperson at your own house. You went with whoever got back to you, unless they were obviously wrong for the job.

The audit that annoys everybody

The first thing we do is list every route by which work can reach you. Not the ones you use, all of them. It is a boring exercise and it usually turns up two or three surprises.

• The main phone line, and the mobile it forwards to, and the second mobile it used to forward to.
• The website form, and where it actually delivers, and whether anybody has tested that this year.
• Texts to the business number, and texts to the owner's personal number, which is a different pile.
• The Google Business Profile messaging feature, which is switched on for a startling number of businesses who have never once looked at it.
• Directory and listing sites, each with their own app and their own notifications.
• Facebook or Instagram messages, usually answered by whoever happens to run the page, at whatever hour they think to look.
• WhatsApp, which is where a lot of your best repeat customers now live whether you like it or not.
• The email address on your van.

Eight or nine channels is normal. Nobody sat down and designed that. It accumulated, one platform at a time, over a decade, and each one seemed harmless when it was added.

One inbox is not a software preference

The reason to pull all of that into one place is not tidiness, and it is definitely not so you can look at a nice dashboard. It is that a reply time you cannot see is a reply time you cannot set.

While enquiries live in eight apps, the speed of your business is decided by chance: by who is holding which phone, by which app pushed a notification loudly enough, by whether the person who normally checks the listings is on holiday. Once they arrive in one place, the question stops being a mystery and becomes a decision. How fast do we reply, and to what, and who does it.

That is the whole trick. Everything after it is plumbing.

Sixty seconds, and why we do not say instant

We aim for a first reply inside a minute, on every channel, at every hour. Some of that is the system answering, and some of it is routing straight to whoever is actually free.

We do not say instant, for two reasons. The first is that instant is a word for a demo, not for the real world with an outage in it. The second is that a reply that arrives in the same half second the form is submitted reads as a machine, and reads as a machine at exactly the moment you least want it to. A minute feels like an attentive human who was nearby. Half a second feels like an autoresponder, and gets treated with the attention an autoresponder deserves.

The first reply is also not doing the whole job. It confirms a real person or a real system has the request, answers the obvious question if the obvious question is answerable, and asks the one thing that has to be known next. Location, usually, or urgency. It buys you the rest of the day.

Routing by who is free, not by who is senior

Most businesses route enquiries by hierarchy without realising it. Everything goes to the owner, because the owner is the one who knows. Which works right up until the owner is under a floor, and then the whole intake process of the business is blocked behind one person's afternoon.

Routing by availability instead sounds like a small change and it is not. It means the enquiry finds the first person who can act on it, and the reply time stops depending on any individual's day. It also means, and people are quietly relieved about this part, the owner stops being the bottleneck they have privately known they were for years.

The honest limits

• This does not make you better at the work, it makes you reachable. If the underlying problem is that jobs are running over and customers are annoyed, faster replies will get you more of a thing that is not working.
• Some channels are hostile to consolidation. Certain listing sites do everything they can to keep the conversation inside their own app, because that is their business model. We get what we can and are straight with you about what we cannot.
• If you are a one person business at capacity, a shorter reply time mostly means saying no faster. That is still worth something, but it is not more revenue and we will not pretend it is.
• It will surface how many enquiries you were losing, which is useful information and not a pleasant afternoon.

If you want to see the version of this that deals with the phone specifically, that is the receptionist piece, and the narrower fix for calls that ring out is missed call recovery. This one is the layer over all of it. Whichever door somebody walks through, the same speed comes back.