A 5-Day Look at Response Times

How quickly do you think home improvement companies respond to customers? One performance marketing company decided to find out. Using secret shoppers, Valve+Meter tracked more than 450 home services companies (i.e., home improvement, HVAC, plumbing, etc.) over five days. What they found was a blend of alarming and, for business owners, encouraging. 

Here are some of our biggest takeaways: 

1. Web lead conversion rates are important, because they’re a potential source of serious revenue growth. An increase of 10% to a business’s rate could mean growth of more than $50,000, according to Valve+Meter’s projections. 

2. Valve+Meter researchers put in service requests at each of the 466 companies, and after five days, only 60% had responded. The remaining never responded. 

3. While the factors that Valve+Meter blamed for slow (or no) response times varied, the report identified “outdated, highly manual practices that build incredible delays into lead response time” as the primary culprit, citing obsolete CRMs and phone systems; a lack of email automation and cross-channel response strategies; and poor training and sales processes. 

4. If a company didn’t respond to a lead in the first six hours, there was a 75% chance they weren’t going to respond at all.