Two different questions get mixed up here, and separating them changes everything.
The first is how long it takes to send a complete quotation with rates, terms and delivery. That can legitimately take two days.
The second is how long before the person who enquired hears anything at all. That should be measured in minutes, and in most businesses nobody has ever measured it.
What a buyer reads into the wait
He is not thinking about your workload. He has no idea what your Tuesday looks like.
What he experiences is simple. He raised his hand, and either somebody noticed or nobody did. A reply in twenty minutes saying we have got it, I will send you the full working by tomorrow evening, is worth more than most owners believe. It tells him there is a person on the other side who is organised.
Two days of silence tells him something too, and he will carry that impression into every later conversation about price and delivery.
Most businesses are slower than they think
Ask your team how fast you respond and you will hear same day. Then go and check the last twenty enquiries against the time they arrived.
The average is nearly always worse than the belief, and the reason is not laziness. It is that enquiries arrive while people are in the middle of something else, and nothing holds them until somebody is free.
Which means the fix is not telling people to be faster. It is making sure a new enquiry is visible to somebody whose job it is to see it.
Check your last twenty enquiries against the clock. What is your real average, and how far is it from what you assumed?
Making a new enquiry impossible to miss is one of the simplest things we build. Ask us what your real response time could be.
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