first response time

First response time measures the gap, not the reply. It says nothing about whether the answer was any good. That is what reading conversations back is for. What it does have, and almost nothing else in an inbox does, is attribution: a slow first reply belongs to a specific hour and a specific person, regardless of which fans they inherited. That is why it moves before revenue does, and why it is worth watching even though it is not a sales metric.

What does first response time actually tell you?

That someone was there, or was not. Three things it exposes, in order of how often they turn out to be the cause:

• Coverage holes. Blocks of hours with nobody assigned, which show up as a cliff at the same clock time every day.
• Overload. Nobody is missing; there are simply more threads open than one person can reach, which shows up as a slow drift across a whole shift rather than a cliff.
• Bad triage. The queue is being worked newest-first, so old threads sit while new ones get answered twice.

The distinction matters because the three have different fixes and only one of them is solved by hiring.

How do you measure it without fooling yourself?

Median, per shift, on threads a fan actually started. Four rules do most of the work:

Rule	Why
Use the median, not the average	One thread answered nine hours later moves an average and tells you nothing
Cut it by shift block	An account-wide number is the average of a good evening and an empty night
Exclude replies to a mass message	Those arrive in a batch and describe your send, not your coverage
Count from the fan’s message, not from when the thread was opened	Opening a thread is not answering it

Whoever is on shift will optimise whatever you display, so be careful what you display. A team measured on first response time alone will send fast, empty replies to stop the clock, which is why the number belongs next to a conversion rate, not instead of one.

Which hours break first?

The night ones, and they break twice over. Our data shows conversion collapsing in the 2am-6am window and peaking in the evening, so those hours are already the weakest before anyone is late to them. A thin night rota therefore produces a number that looks alarming and a revenue loss that is smaller than it looks, while a slow evening, where the same delay lands on the hours that carry the month, is the one worth acting on. Read first response time against the shift rotation or it will send you to the wrong place.

Does answering faster sell more?

Our data does not measure that, and it is worth being straight about it. What we have measured is where the offer lands: pitching before the sixth message costs roughly a third of conversion, with the optimum after about ten real exchanges. Speed gets you into the conversation; position inside the conversation is what sells. A fast chatter who opens with a price is quick to lose the thread.

Treat it as a coverage number with a floor rather than a target to keep pushing. Then read what our data does not show before turning it into a bonus.