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Response Time

The short answer

Response time is the promise of how fast you reply to a call or a message — a stated window, not a best-effort guess. It is a different promise from the out-of-hours rate, which prices when you show up, and from lead time, which prices when a job can start.

What it means

A client cannot see your diary, so response time is the one promise they can actually test — every reply either lands inside the window you stated, or it does not. Stating a number, such as "within one working day," turns a vague hope into something a client can hold you to and you can actually meet.

It is easy to confuse with two other promises that sound similar. The out-of-hours rate is what a call outside normal hours costs, not how fast you answer it. Lead time is how soon a job can start once it is booked, not how soon you reply to the enquiry that books it. All three can be true at once about the same message, and a client needs each one stated separately.

For example

A tradesperson states a response time of "within one working day, Monday to Friday." A message that arrives Friday evening gets a reply by end of day Monday — inside the stated window, even though two days have passed on the calendar.

The mistake to avoid

Answering fast most of the time and calling that a response time — a real response time is the slowest you will ever take, not the fastest, because a client remembers the one message that took three days, not the ten that took an hour.

See also

Out-of-Hours RateLead TimeOn-Call

Where this shows up

Guide

Working hours and boundaries — the hours you answer are the promise

A client cannot see your diary. They read your hours from when you actually answer, not from what you post. Set the hours you work and the hours you answer as two different windows, say both in the three places a client looks, price a genuine emergency in advance, and hold the line the first time it is inconvenient.

 Guide

Responding to a new inquiry — the reply that keeps you in the running

The job is often decided before a quote exists — in how fast you reply, and whether that reply asks the right questions instead of guessing a number.

 Free tool

Working hours check

Type in the hours you intend to work, the hours you actually answer, and the admin hours outside both, and see the gap between the week you meant to run and the week you are actually running — plus what each one pays per hour.

 Templates

Working hours scripts, for saying when you answer

Six messages for setting the hours you work and the hours you answer as two separate things — the quote or booking-confirmation line, the voicemail message, the next-morning reply to a late message, a note to a client who always calls late, offering or declining a priced emergency route, and resetting the expectation with a client you have been answering at all hours — fill in your details once at the top of this page and every script below rewrites itself.

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