Firms often ask for a benchmark: five minutes, fifteen minutes, an hour. Published figures vary widely and rarely describe the same conditions, so treating any single number as a rule is a mistake. The better approach is to set a standard your firm can meet consistently and then measure against it.
Set the standard from your own data
Look at leads your firm reached and signed over the last several months and compare their first-contact times to leads that went nowhere. If contact within the first hour clearly outperforms contact on day two, you have a defensible internal target. Building the standard from your own history avoids arguing about statistics from unrelated markets.
Immediate acknowledgment is not the same as contact
An automated text or email confirming that the firm received the inquiry and will call shortly serves a different purpose from a live conversation. It reduces the chance that the claimant assumes no one is coming and continues shopping. It does not replace the call, and it should not be counted as a contact attempt in your reporting.
Design the cadence around real behavior
Claimants who are injured, in treatment, or at work do not always answer the first call. A cadence should account for that:
- Multiple attempts on day one, spaced apart rather than back to back.
- Attempts at different times of day across the following days.
- A text or email alongside calls, since many people respond in writing first.
- A defined stopping point after which a lead is marked unreachable.
Handle the hours you are closed
If a meaningful share of leads arrives outside business hours, the response standard has to say what happens to them. An answering service, an on-call rotation, or an acknowledgment with a specific callback window are all reasonable answers. Silence until the next business day is a decision too, and it should be made deliberately rather than by default.
Make the standard visible
Intake staff meet targets they can see. A simple dashboard showing new leads, time since arrival, and attempts made turns response time from a monthly review topic into something managed in the moment. Direct CRM delivery makes that visibility possible, because the record exists in the system the moment the lead qualifies.
Firms adding volume should confirm the standard first. New leads reveal intake gaps quickly. If you would like to talk through capacity before increasing volume, book a consultation.