Answer every new lead within minutes and let an agent send the first reply

Last Wednesday in London, Meta said its Business Agent is rolling out to businesses worldwide on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. According to Meta’s own announcement, the agent answers questions about your business, recommends products from your catalog, books appointments, qualifies incoming leads and lets you decide when a person on your team steps in. Getting started is free, and Meta says more than one million businesses already use a version of it.

That matters less as a Meta story and more as a signal. A tool that replies to every inquiry in seconds is now free for any company with a WhatsApp number. If your team still answers web leads the next morning, your competitors’ first reply is going to beat yours.

Most companies are still slow, and the data on that is old

The best-known study on this is fifteen years old and I still think it describes most companies today. In 2011 the Harvard Business Review published research by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington. They sent test inquiries to 2,241 US companies through their websites. As SmartCompany reported at the time, 37% responded within an hour, 24% took more than a day and 23% never responded at all. The average response time among companies that did reply within 30 days was 42 hours.

The same piece cites a separate analysis of 1.25 million leads: firms that reached a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as firms that waited even one more hour, and more than 60 times as likely as firms that waited a day or longer.

DataHow fast 2,241 companies replied

Within an hour37%
One to 24 hours16%
More than 24 hours24%
Never replied23%

Almost one company in four never answered a web inquiry at all. Source: smartcompany.com.au

Nobody on your sales team decides to let a lead sit for 42 hours. It happens because the form submission lands in a shared inbox at 7pm, the rep who owns that territory is on a call the next morning, and by the afternoon the person who asked has already booked with someone else. That is a staffing and routing problem. It is also the exact shape of problem an agent handles well.

Automate the first reply, keep people on the second conversation

When I look at a sales follow-up process, I split it into two jobs. The first job is the first reply: acknowledge the inquiry, answer the two or three questions everyone asks, find out whether this person is a fit, and offer a time to talk. The second job is the sale itself: pricing exceptions, negotiation, scoping, anything that commits the company to something.

The first job is repetitive and time-sensitive. The second job is where your best people earn their pay. An agent should own the first one completely and stay out of the second.

A good first reply from an agent does four things:

It answers within a minute or two, at any hour, on the channel the person used.
It answers the actual question asked, using your real prices, hours and service area.
It asks the two qualifying questions your best rep would ask, such as budget range and timing.
It books a meeting on a real calendar or hands the conversation to a named person.

FlowA new lead with an agent on the first reply

01Inquiry arrives
02Agent replies in minutes
03Agent asks fit questions
04Books a call or hands off
05Rep runs the sales call

The agent owns the first reply and the booking, and a person owns everything after that.

Write the handoff rules before you switch it on

Meta’s agent lets the business set the conditions for when a team member steps in. Every tool worth using has some version of this, and it is the setting most companies skip. Write those rules down first, in plain sentences, the way you would brief a new hire on day one.

Here is what I would put in that brief:

The agent never offers a discount, a custom price or a delivery date that is not on the published list.
The agent hands off immediately when someone mentions a complaint, a legal question or an existing order problem.
The agent hands off when a lead fits your ideal customer and asks to talk to a person.
The agent tells people it is an AI assistant when they ask, and it never pretends to be a named employee.

Then decide who receives the handoff and how fast they must respond. An agent that qualifies a lead in two minutes and then drops it into a queue nobody checks until tomorrow has only moved the delay.

Follow-up is where the money actually leaks

Speed on the first reply gets the attention, but in my experience the bigger loss is the second and third touch. A lead asks a question, gets an answer, goes quiet, and nobody writes back. Reps mean to follow up. Then the week fills up.

This is the second place to put an agent. Have it draft the follow-up on a schedule you set, such as the next business day and again four days later, using what the lead actually said in the first conversation. For the first few weeks, have a rep approve each draft before it goes out. You will learn quickly which messages the agent writes well and which ones need a person. Once the drafts are consistently right, let the routine ones send on their own and keep approval on anything that mentions price.

Keep the rule simple: every open lead has a next step with a date on it, and either a person or the agent owns that step.

You also need a baseline, or you will never know whether any of this worked. Before you turn anything on, pull your numbers for the last 30 days. Count how many inquiries came in, how long the first reply took on average and how many never got one. Most companies have never looked at this, and the first look is usually uncomfortable.

After the agent has run for a month, compare the same three numbers plus one more: how many qualified meetings got booked. Response time is a means. Booked meetings with people who fit is the result you are paying for. If response time drops and booked meetings stay flat, the agent is replying fast to the wrong people or asking the wrong questions, and the brief needs work.

What to do this week

Submit an inquiry through your own website, your WhatsApp or Instagram, and your phone line after hours, and time how long each reply takes.
Pull the last 30 days of leads and write down the average time to first reply and the number that never got one.
Write the one-page brief for the agent: the common questions with real answers, the two qualifying questions, and the handoff rules above.
Pick one channel, the one with the slowest replies, and put an agent on the first reply there only.
Name the person who receives every handoff and agree on how fast they respond.