How Quickly Should Aesthetic Clinics Contact New Leads?

What the evidence says

The most cited study of lead response time is an audit published by Harvard Business Review. Researchers submitted web enquiries to 2,241 US companies and timed the replies. Thirty-seven per cent responded within an hour. Twenty-four per cent took more than a day. Twenty-three per cent never responded. The average response time, among firms that did respond, was 42 hours.

The same researchers found that firms which tried to contact a lead within an hour of receiving it were nearly seven times as likely to qualify that lead as firms which tried an hour later.

Two cautions. The study is from 2011 and it covered companies across many sectors, not clinics. We cite it for the shape of the finding: the value of an enquiry falls fast, and most businesses answer far too slowly to catch it. We do not claim its exact multiples apply to an aesthetic clinic. Response time is one of five reasons an enquiry is lost; why aesthetic clinic leads don’t book sets out the other four.

Why the clock runs faster for aesthetic enquiries

Three things make a clinic enquiry more perishable than the average web form.

• The source. Enquiries from Instagram and Facebook arrive when people are on those platforms, which is disproportionately evenings and weekends, outside clinic hours. An enquiry that lands at 9pm on a Saturday and is answered at 9am on Monday has waited a day and a half.
• The decision. A consultation for a treatment is a considered, personal purchase. The moment of enquiry is often the moment of most confidence. Every hour that passes gives the patient time to reconsider, to talk themselves out of it, or to notice the next clinic’s advert.
• The alternatives. Most patients enquire with more than one clinic. The clinic that replies first is the clinic that sets the terms of the conversation.

Minutes, hours, days

It helps to think about delay in three bands, because the remedy for each is different.

Minutes

The patient is still holding the phone and still thinking about the treatment. A reply now is a continuation of the same moment. This band can only be reached reliably with automation for the first message and a person alerted at the same instant.

Hours

The patient has moved on to something else but has not forgotten. A reply here is a reminder, and it works best when it gives them something to do rather than something to read.

Days

The patient has, in effect, re-enquired somewhere else or decided not to. A reply here is a re-introduction. It is still worth sending, and it is not where the business is won.

What automation should and should not do

The first message can and should be automatic, because no rota can put a person on every enquiry within a minute at every hour. What the automatic message should do is narrow: confirm the enquiry arrived, say who will be in touch and how, and give the patient a way to start the conversation themselves if they want to.

What it should not do is pretend to be a person, answer clinical questions, quote a price for a treatment the patient has not been assessed for, or send a stream of follow-ups that a human never sees. The conversation that turns an enquiry into a booking is a human one. Automation exists to make sure that conversation starts while it still can.

Two practical notes. First, a message that acknowledges an enquiry is different in kind from a marketing message, but the wording your form uses to explain what happens next should match what you actually send, so check it. Second, whichever channel you use for the human conversation, make sure the patient can reach it with one tap from the message they receive.

A standard a small team can keep

This is the standard we recommend. It is deliberately modest in the number of steps, because a standard with twelve steps is a standard nobody keeps.

The last row matters as much as the first. A record of how many enquiries went unconfirmed, and when they arrived, is the only way to see whether the standard is actually being kept.

How to measure your own response time

Time to contact is the interval between the enquiry being submitted and a person confirming they made contact. It is not the time an automated message was sent, and it is not the time an alert was opened. Record it per enquiry, then report the median and the mean over a month. If the median is minutes and the mean is hours, a small number of enquiries are being missed badly, and those are the ones to look at.

How Outcome Reach handles this

As a statement of our method rather than evidence for it: in an Outcome Reach installation the patient receives a text within thirty seconds and the clinic receives an alert with a tap-to-chat link at the same moment, so the human conversation starts on WhatsApp while the enquiry is minutes old. If no contact has been confirmed within an hour, counted in opening hours, the clinic receives a reminder. The patient receives no further automated messages. Time to contact is recorded for every enquiry. The system in full describes the follow-up component.