aideagoHow does replying quickly to customers increase sales?
When a customer writes to you, their interest is at its peak. As the minutes pass, they may have written to another business, sorted things out or given up. That is why a fast reply is worth so much. Two studies are cited most often on this topic, and we set out the limits of each.
What do the studies say?
Harvard Business Review, 2011. The summary of "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads" by Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington says the research showed that most companies do not respond to incoming enquiries quickly enough. We could not access the full text of the article, so we do not quote any figures from it.
Oldroyd and InsideSales.com, 2007. More than 15,000 enquiries from six companies were examined over three years. The document reports these findings:
- When an enquiry is followed up within 5 minutes rather than 30 minutes, the chance of reaching the customer is 100 times higher.
- When an enquiry is followed up within 5 minutes rather than 30 minutes, the chance of qualifying the lead (that is, finding out whether they are a genuinely interested and suitable customer) is 21 times higher.
This study has two limits: it was carried out jointly with a sales software company, and it is not a peer-reviewed journal article. What it measures is also not sales but contact and qualification. In other words, it does not say "reply within 5 minutes and you will sell this much". It is also 2007 data, and habits today may be different. Still, the direction is clear: the longer you wait, the colder the customer gets.
What does this mean for a small business?
- The first reply matters more than the second. When a customer writes to you, the work has already begun; silence stops it.
- The reply does not need to be perfect, it needs to be on time. A short, accurate first reply beats a long one that arrives late.
- Customers write at night and at weekends too. Enquiries that arrive outside working hours are the ones most often lost.
A practical setup for fast replies
- List the channels enquiries come from: website form, Instagram messages and comments, email, WhatsApp.
- Prepare the ten most frequent questions and their answers: price, opening hours, address, bookings, delivery.
- Set a target time for the first reply to every enquiry, and actually measure it.
- Decide in advance who questions that cannot be answered get passed to.
- Once a reply is sent, record the outcome: won, pending, dropped.
People or automation?
Simple, repetitive questions (price, opening hours, address) are a very good fit for automation. Sensitive conversations, complaints and anything that needs special handling call for your judgement. A good setup separates the two: it answers the easy ones straight away and passes the hard ones to you or the person responsible.
At aideago, agents track enquiries coming from your website, Instagram and email, the WhatsApp assistant replies day and night, and every new enquiry is sent to your phone as a notification instantly.