When I moved into my condo, it took me a couple of months to find a tile guy to replace my kitchen floor. The job was “too small,” one contractor flat out said to me.

When I was writing articles for an insurance company, two brokers and one attorney (the company’s contacts) kept agreeing to phone interviews and blowing me off. “They’re hard to nail down when they’re busy,” sighed my client.

When a friend was looking for a company to build a fence, one contractor showed up nearly an hour late (with no “heads up” call) just to write an estimate.

When another friend was looking for a handyman, she waited two weeks for a callback because the guy came highly recommended. She hired someone else.

Hubspot recently pointed to data from Harvard Business Review that found:

Companies that try to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving queries are nearly 7 times as likely to have meaningful conversations with key decision makers as firms that try to contact prospects even an hour later. Yet only 37 percent of companies respond to queries within an hour.”

While not everyone needs to have a 60-minute window, every business has to be responsive.

Customers have choices. I wonder how many of the folks my friends and I contacted are still in business today.

Is your business responsive?

Photo by Darwin Bell (Flickr).