GUIDE · MEASURE YOUR OWN
How fast does your company answer a new call? Find out this week.
We do not publish a South Florida average, because we have not measured one and we will not make one up. What we can give you is a way to get your own number in an afternoon, with nothing but a spare phone.
A note on what this is. Every number you get from this guide is yours. There is no benchmark to compare it to here, and any average you find elsewhere is worth checking for who measured it, how, and when.
Why your own number beats an average
An average tells you about other companies. Your number tells you what a customer feels when they call you. And most of the delay sits in hours when nobody is at the desk, so it tends to surprise people.
The four tests
Use a phone that is not on your company account. For each test, write down the exact time you reached out and the exact time a real reply came back. Not an auto-reply that says "we got it." A reply with a time, a price, or a person.
- Tuesday, 9 PM. Web form. Fill out your own website form. Note when a real reply arrives. If it is the next morning, write down the time.
- Saturday, 10 AM. Web form again. Same thing on a weekend. If the reply comes Monday, that is the number.
- Any weeknight, after hours. Voicemail. Call the main line and leave a message asking for a call back. Note when the call comes.
- A busy weekday afternoon. Missed call. Call and hang up before anyone answers. Does anything come back at all? A text? A call? When?
If you serve Spanish-speaking customers, run all four again in Spanish. The Spanish numbers are usually longer, because the reply has to wait for a Spanish speaker to be on shift.
FIRST REPLY TIME
Reading your results
- Under a minute, every test. Your phone is already handled. This product buys you less than it costs, and we would say so on a call.
- Minutes during the day, hours at night. The normal shape. The night and weekend calls are the ones going to whoever answered first.
- Hours during the day too. The office is the bottleneck, not the hours. Look at who is on the phone and what else they are doing.
- Nothing came back on the missed call. That caller has already called the next company. This is the cheapest test to fix.
What the fast companies do
They do not hire a night shift. The first reply goes out on its own the moment the call comes in, instead of when somebody next checks. It names the company, offers a real time slot, and comes in the language the customer used. A person follows up in the morning.
Under a minute is a setting, not a measured claim about your company. What it does is take the guesswork out. The reply no longer depends on who is at the desk.
Keep the numbers
Write the eight numbers down with the date. Run the tests again after you change anything. Your own before-and-after is the only benchmark that matters for your company.
Questions we get asked about this
Where do these numbers come from?
From our own setups in west Miami-Dade, not a published study. Where a number would need a measurement we do not have, the guide says so and explains why instead of making one up.
Is there a reply time I should be hitting?
We make a promise about the system, not a research claim: it is set up to reply in under a minute. We do not repeat the popular five-minute rule as if it were proof, because it does not come from research on this industry.
Does a faster reply actually win the job?
It wins the chance to. On an emergency call, the company that answers first usually gets the work. On quoted work, speed only gets you in the running. The follow-up over the next few weeks is what closes it.
Related
Got your numbers?
Bring them to a 30-minute call. We will tell you honestly whether the system would change them, including when the answer is "not much, for a company your size."