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Average Response Time to New Requests measures how long it takes, on average, for a new booking request or inquiry to receive a reply from you or your team.
How It’s Calculated
PetBizApp timestamps every new inquiry the moment it arrives — whether from your booking form, a phone call logged manually, or an app message — and timestamps the first reply sent back to that client. The gap between those two timestamps, averaged across all requests in the period, is your Average Response Time.
What’s a Good Benchmark
Under one hour during business hours is excellent and puts you ahead of most local competitors. Under four hours is solid. Anything regularly over 24 hours is losing you bookings you’ll never see in your data, because most prospective clients simply move on to the next provider on their list without telling you why.
Why It Matters
Pet care is a trust purchase made under time pressure — someone booking a last-minute walker or a sitter for next week’s trip is often comparing three or four providers at once, and the first one to respond with a clear, confident answer wins a disproportionate share of that business. Response time is one of the few KPIs that directly, measurably converts into revenue, independent of your service quality.
This KPI lives on the OPERATE dashboard inside PetBizApp.
A Worked Example
A pet sitting business tracks Average Response Time at 6 hours and 40 minutes over a month, with 40 inquiries in that window. The owner installs the mobile app notification for new inquiries and commits to a same-hour acknowledgment (even a quick “got it, checking availability, back to you within the hour” counts). The next month, average response time drops to 52 minutes across 44 inquiries, and the inquiry-to-booking conversion rate rises from 51% to 63% — the same quality of service, sold faster, converts noticeably more of the people who were already interested.
How This Looks Different By Business Model
For a solo operator juggling actual pet visits during the day, fast response time is genuinely hard — you can’t check messages mid-walk. A short auto-reply confirming receipt and a realistic response window (“I’ll get back to you by 6pm”) does most of the trust-building work even when the full personalized reply comes hours later. For a team with a dedicated office or dispatch role, this number should sit consistently under an hour, since there’s no structural excuse for a slow reply. For businesses that take a meaningful share of inquiries after hours or on weekends, it’s worth tracking business-hours response time separately from raw average, since a 14-hour overnight gap will otherwise drag your average down without reflecting a real problem.
What Causes This Number to Slip
Slow response time usually traces to one of: no one person clearly owning inquiry response, so messages sit assuming someone else will handle them; notifications not set up or muted; inquiries arriving through multiple disconnected channels (a booking form, a Facebook message, a phone voicemail) that aren’t all checked equally often; or simply high volume outpacing the time available to answer thoughtfully.
A Common Misconception
Owners sometimes assume a slower, more thorough first reply beats a fast, brief one. In practice the opposite is usually true for conversion: a fast acknowledgment that sets a clear expectation for a full answer outperforms a slow, complete one, because it removes the anxiety of not knowing whether you’ll hear back at all. Speed of first contact and quality of eventual answer are not the same thing, and you don’t have to sacrifice one for the other.
How to Improve This Number
Centralize inquiries into one inbox or app view instead of checking four separate places, turn on push notifications specifically for new inquiries, and consider a simple auto-reply that confirms receipt within seconds even when a personal response will take longer. Assign response ownership to a specific person or rotation rather than leaving it ambiguous.
Common Mistakes
Letting inquiries sit unanswered overnight or over a weekend without an auto-reply buying time. Treating a personalized, slow answer as always better than a fast, honest one. Not tracking this number at all and assuming response time is fine because “no one’s complained” — most lost inquiries never complain, they just book elsewhere silently.
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