Start with your own response clock
Oldroyd and colleagues flagged slow online responses in HBR in 2011.
For your own team, define the clock before setting a target. Record when the enquiry arrived, when it was acknowledged and when someone could meaningfully discuss the property. Keep those timestamps separate. A quick receipt message is useful, but it should not disguise a long wait for an agent who can answer the actual question.
Review the journey during working hours and outside them. Look at portal, advertisement, website and phone enquiries separately. A single average can hide a channel with no assigned owner. Start with the handoff that the team can explain and change, rather than borrowing a headline response target from someone else’s market.
Find the unowned handoff
If the portal dashboard, the agent’s phone and the office inbox each hold part of the conversation, follow-up becomes a memory test. Give each enquiry one owner and one visible next action. The record should say which listing prompted it, what the buyer is looking for and when the next conversation is due.
Qualification is not an invitation to ask twenty questions before helping. Begin with enough context to offer a relevant next step: locality, budget range, purchase timing and the question the buyer actually asked. Salesforce’s qualification guidance similarly frames fit around need, budget, timing and decision-makers; the form should serve the conversation, not replace it.
Build the next useful step
A practical first version can be small. Agree these rules with the people who will actually answer and book the visits:
- Acknowledge the enquiry and name the next step, including what happens when no agent is available. Do not promise a callback time the team cannot honour.
- Route the listing and enquiry context to a specific person. Avoid making the buyer repeat everything after an automated qualification.
- Give an unanswered call a visible follow-up action and a stopping rule. Apply the customer’s permissions and respect requests to stop.
- Connect a site-visit booking to the CRM record, then update that record when the visit is attended, changed or cancelled.
- Revisit past enquiries only when the new inventory is relevant and the contact permissions allow it. An old number is not unlimited permission to message.
Measure speed without mistaking it for the outcome
Review first-response time, meaningful contact, qualification and booked visits together. Compare the same source and reporting period before and after a change. Record cancellations and missed visits too; a calendar entry is not the final commercial result.
An improvement in reply speed earns another question: did more suitable buyers reach a useful conversation? If not, inspect routing, inventory fit and the handoff before increasing message volume. Keep the test bounded and the starting numbers visible. The purpose is a working route from enquiry to visit, not a dashboard full of fast acknowledgements.