What this metric is
First response time is the gap between the customer writing or calling and a real person on your side answering. An autoresponder does not count: the customer is waiting for an answer to their question.
This is the cheapest metric to fix: all it takes is a rule about who picks up an enquiry and how fast.
The market numbers
42 hoursaverage first response across the market
23%of companies reply within five minutes
78%of people buy from whoever answered first
32% vs 12%conversion at under five minutes versus over a day
One more figure from the same research: an enquiry handled within five minutes reaches qualification 21 times more often than the same enquiry half an hour later. Half an hour already means a different outcome.
Why 42 hours when everyone knows speed matters
- No rule about who takes the enquiry. When the owner is «whoever is free», nobody is free.
- Enquiries land in different places. Instagram, Telegram, email, website form, phone. The rep looks where they are used to looking.
- Nobody measures it. The manager sees only lead count and sales count.
- Nights and weekends. Half the delay happens in hours when nobody is working, and there is no separate rule for it.
How to measure yours in one evening
- Take the last 50 enquiries in a row, across all channels.
- For each, note the time it arrived and the time a human first replied.
- Calculate the median. One reply after three days ruins an average; the median shows the truth.
- Separately, calculate the share of enquiries that waited longer than an hour. That is the number that hurts most.
- Split working from non-working hours. Those are two different faults and they are fixed differently.
Double Sales measured exactly this way on a furniture project. Median first reply during working hours was 9 minutes, which is good. But one customer in thirteen waited more than an hour, and the owner had no idea, because the CRM has no such field.
What to do about it
- One rule for every channel: who takes it, within what time, and what they do if they cannot.
- Automatic reminders. The system tells the rep a thread is unanswered. The manager does not have to go and check.
- A separate rule for out-of-hours. Either a rota, or an honest message stating when a human will reply.
- The number in the daily report. Median, plus the share who waited over an hour. One figure, visible every day.