How quickly should you answer an enquiry?

An enquiry through your website is a moment of attention. Someone has a problem, looks for a solution and leaves their details. At that moment that person is thinking about your company. A day later their attention has moved on to other things. Perhaps a competitor called back faster in the meantime.

How quickly you respond seems like a detail. Research shows it is one of the biggest factors in whether you ever get that prospect on the phone.

What the research says

The best known study on this subject appeared in the Harvard Business Review in 2011. James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington sent test enquiries to 2,241 American companies and measured how long it took those companies to respond. According to their article in the Harvard Business Review, 37 per cent responded within the hour. 24 per cent took longer than a day, 23 per cent never responded. Among the companies that answered within 30 days, the average response time was 42 hours.

In a second study the same researchers looked at 1.25 million enquiries at 42 American companies. Companies that tried to make contact within the hour were nearly seven times as likely to have a real conversation with a decision maker as companies that called an hour later. Compared with companies that waited 24 hours or more, the chance was more than 60 times as high. That too appears in the same article.

Two caveats are needed. The research was carried out in the United States. It is also fifteen years old by now. The exact ratios will differ in a Flemish SME. The direction of the finding is clear, though: the chance of contact drops quickly with every hour an enquiry is left waiting.

Why enquiries are left waiting

The researchers named several causes themselves. We recognise them in Flemish companies too. Enquiries are pulled from a system once a day instead of immediately. Salespeople are busy with their own prospecting and see an incoming enquiry as an interruption. Enquiries are assigned by region or by rota, so they wait for the right person.

Smaller companies have other reasons on top of these.

• The enquiry lands in a general mailbox that nobody reads daily.
• The owner is on site or with a client and only sees the email in the evening.
• It is unclear who is responsible, so everyone counts on a colleague.
• An enquiry through social media or a phone call is never recorded anywhere.

What is achievable within the hour

An SME cannot answer every enquiry personally within five minutes. Nor does it need to. The goal is that the prospect quickly sees their question has arrived and that there is a concrete next step.

An immediate confirmation. Right after filling in the form, the prospect receives an email confirming that their question has come in, saying when they will hear back and who will contact them.

A notification to the right person. The enquiry arrives as a task for one responsible person, with a notification on their phone. No general mailbox, no assignment after the fact.

A way to book a meeting. Let the prospect choose a time for a conversation in the confirmation email. That way there is a concrete appointment, even if you can only call later.

A fixed rule for follow-up. Agree that every enquiry during office hours gets a personal answer within the hour. Outside office hours the answer goes out first thing the next morning. What has been agreed can also be measured.

Automating without becoming impersonal

Speed must not come at the expense of quality. An automatic reply that is obviously a template and answers none of the prospect's questions makes little impression.

A good automatic confirmation is short, names the person who will follow up and briefly repeats what the enquiry was about. It may ask for missing information, so that the first conversation gets to the point straight away. The personal contact afterwards remains the core. The automation makes sure that contact happens faster and better prepared.

Measure what you do as well. A CRM can record for each enquiry how much time passed between arrival and first contact. After a month you can see where the delay lies and which channels are followed up more slowly.

What you can do now

• Send an enquiry through your own website yourself and see how long it takes for someone to respond. Also note what the prospect receives in the meantime.
• Decide who is responsible for new enquiries and which response time you aim for.
• Make sure every enquiry, whatever the channel, ends up in one place with a notification to that person.

From Ghent we set up follow-up systems like these for SMEs across Flanders. On our page about lead generation you can read how we get enquiries to the right person faster, while hetdesignbureau.be builds the website and the forms where those enquiries come in.