How fast should a small business reply to a new enquiry?

Reply to a new enquiry as fast as you reasonably can: an instant, useful acknowledgement straight away, then a personal reply the same business day, and sooner for urgent work. The research does suggest that early replies win more conversations. But the dramatic multipliers you see quoted online are less solid than they look, and a small team doesn’t need to answer in five minutes to do well.

Why the first reply matters

When someone sends an enquiry, they’re usually contacting more than one business. They’re comparing, and they’re busy. The first business to reply with something useful gets the first real conversation, and often sets the terms for everyone else.

Silence works against you. A day without a reply reads as “too busy” or “not interested”. By the time you get back to them, they may have booked a time with someone else, or just lost the urge to do it at all.

Speed isn’t everything, though. A fast reply that ignores their question is worse than a slightly slower one that answers it. The goal is to be quick and useful.

What the research says, and what it doesn’t

Much of the “speed to lead” discussion traces back to a small number of studies. The best known is a 2011 Harvard Business Review article, “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads”, by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington. The researchers looked at how quickly a large sample of US companies answered web enquiries. They reported that most companies responded slowly, and that companies replying within an hour were much more likely to have a meaningful conversation with the person enquiring than companies that waited longer.

That’s a useful finding. Here’s what it doesn’t show:

• It isn’t about your industry. The work looked at US companies handling online sales leads, not a local plumber, physio or accountant.
• It shows a pattern, not cause and effect. Companies that reply fast may also be better organised in other ways.
• It’s more than a decade old. How people enquire, and what they expect, has changed since.
• The popular figures don’t always match the source. Many blogs quote very precise multipliers for five-minute replies without saying where they come from, or attribute the same number to different studies.

The honest summary: replying quickly very likely helps, and slow replies very likely cost you some work. How much depends on your business, and nobody can give you a reliable number for it.

A realistic target for a small team

A five-minute personal reply around the clock isn’t realistic for most small businesses, and you don’t need it. This works for most service businesses:

If you’re a sole operator who spends most of the day with clients or on site, the instant acknowledgement does more of the work. Set aside two or three fixed times a day to reply to enquiries, such as before your first appointment, at lunch and at the end of the day, and say so in the acknowledgement. People are happy to wait when they know when to expect you.

Pick targets you can hit every day, not just on a quiet Tuesday. A promise you keep beats a faster one you break.

The instant acknowledgement: what to send

The automatic reply buys you time, but only if it’s useful. A good one does four things: A website chatbot can do this inside the chat, as long as it hands over to a person.

1. Confirms you received the enquiry.
2. Says when a person will be in touch.
3. Asks one question that helps you reply properly.
4. Gives an option for anything urgent.

Example by email or text:

Hi [Name], thanks for getting in touch with [Business]. We’ve got your enquiry about [service] and [Person] will reply by [time or day]. To help us give you a proper answer, could you let us know [one useful question]? If it’s urgent, call us on [number].

Keep the question specific: a photo of the problem, the suburb, preferred days, or the size of the job. One question gets answered. Five get ignored.

A quick note on rules: an automatic reply that’s purely about the enquiry is generally not a marketing message. If you add offers or promotions, Australia’s Spam Act rules on consent and unsubscribing apply, according to ACMA. Keep the acknowledgement about their enquiry.

After hours and weekends

Plenty of enquiries arrive in the evening, when people finally sit down to deal with the leaking tap or the overdue tax return. You have a few options: For phone calls, missed call text back does the same job as an email acknowledgement.

• An after-hours acknowledgement that says you’re closed and when you’ll reply. This is the minimum.
• Online booking, so people can lock in a call or appointment without waiting for you.
• An on-call roster for urgent enquiries, if your service needs one.
• An AI assistant or answering service that can answer common questions and take details.

An after-hours acknowledgement might read:

Thanks for your message. We’re closed for the evening, and [Person] will reply by 10am tomorrow. If you’d like to lock in a time now, you can book a call here: [link].

Whatever you choose, the first job on the next business morning should be clearing the overnight enquiries, oldest first.

Routing enquiries to the right person

Slow replies are often a routing problem, not a laziness problem. The enquiry lands in a shared inbox, everyone assumes someone else has it, and nobody replies.

• Every enquiry gets one named owner as soon as it arrives.
• Route by service, location or type of job, so it goes straight to the person who can answer.
• Set a backup for when the owner is away, sick or on site.
• If an enquiry sits unanswered past your target, it gets flagged to someone else.

For example, a small accounting practice might send tax return enquiries to one person and bookkeeping enquiries to another, with the practice manager as backup for both. A trades business might route by suburb, so the enquiry goes to whoever works that area.

A CRM does this better than a shared inbox, because each enquiry has an owner, a status and a time stamp you can see at a glance.

Measuring your own response time

Most owners guess their response time, and most guess low. Two ways to find out:

• Test it. Send a few enquiries through your own website form, by email and by text, at different times of day. Note how long each one takes to get a personal reply.
• Check the records. For the last month of enquiries, compare when each arrived with when it got its first personal reply. A CRM can report this automatically; an inbox takes a bit of manual work.

Once you have the numbers, look for patterns. Are the slow replies on Mondays, after hours, or for one type of enquiry? Do enquiries from one channel, such as Facebook messages, get missed more often than website forms? The fix is usually specific: a better after-hours reply, a clearer owner for one type of enquiry, or one more channel connected to the same inbox.

A one-week plan

• Day 1: send yourself three test enquiries and time the replies.
• Day 2: write an instant acknowledgement for business hours and one for after hours.
• Day 3: decide who owns each type of enquiry, and who covers for them.
• Day 4: set your targets and share them with the team.
• End of the week: check the records and see how you went.

If you’d like the acknowledgements, routing and reporting set up for you, CentriWeb builds enquiry automation for local services businesses and other small teams.