Disclosure: I run Auto-Respond, an AI lead-response tool for home-service businesses. This post is about the problem, not a pitch. The product link sits at the bottom.
Most "lead management" advice treats speed as a nice-to-have. For local service businesses it is close to the whole game, and it turns out to be an interesting systems problem.
The number that matters
Dr. James Oldroyd's lead-response research at MIT found that waiting even 5 to 30 minutes to respond makes you roughly 100x less likely to ever reach a lead. Harvard Business Review's audit of thousands of US companies found the median first-response time was measured in hours, and a large share never responded at all. The business that answers first usually books the job.
So the target is not "respond quickly." The target is: first meaningful reply in under 2 seconds, 24/7, with no human in the loop for the first touch.
