What "fast" means to a customer who rings you

Ask a business owner whether they respond quickly and most will say yes. Ask what quickly means and the answers spread out: within the hour, the same day, first thing tomorrow. Customers have a much narrower view.

Minutes, or seconds

In January 2026 Censuswide surveyed 5,001 UK consumers and 2,000 UK business decision-makers for Moneypenny, a UK call-answering company. 59% of the consumers said they expect a phone response within minutes or seconds before they start to lose trust in a business.

The wording matters. The finding is about trust, and it is about the phone in particular. A slow reply does more than risk one sale. It shapes what the customer thinks of you before you have spoken to them at all.

Ten minutes, by one definition

HubSpot, the US marketing software company, has written about response times for years. On its own blog it reports that a majority of people rated an immediate response from a business as important or very important, rising to 90% when the matter was a customer support question. HubSpot then gives its own definition of immediate: 10 minutes or less.

Be careful with that second part. The 10 minutes is HubSpot's description of what immediate means now, not a number any survey produced. The research behind the 90% dates back to 2018, HubSpot gives no sample size, and the article was written about live chat and online enquiries rather than phone calls. We include it because it is widely repeated, often in a garbled form, and the original says less than the copies do.

Businesses already know this

None of it would surprise most owners. Back in 2014, BT Business commissioned Populus to survey 505 IT decision-makers and 1,010 business users at UK companies with 20 to 249 employees. 90% agreed that their clients were increasingly demanding faster responses. That was more than a decade ago.

Why the phone sets a higher bar

Someone who sends an email expects to wait a while. Someone who rings wants an answer now, which is usually why they rang rather than typed. The same Moneypenny research found 70% of consumers said phone calls meet their expectations well. People still trust the phone to get things done. That is exactly why an unanswered call lands harder than an unread email: the customer chose the channel they expected to work.

Measure your own response time

You can find your real number without any new software.

1. For a fortnight, note every call you missed and the time you rang back.
2. Work out the gap for each one, and be honest about the ones you never returned.
3. Put the typical gap next to the 59% finding: minutes, or seconds.

Then look at when the slow callbacks happened. If they bunch up in your busiest hours, that is the gap to close first, because those are the hours when you have the least time to chase anyone and the caller has the most choice of who else to try.

Closing the gap

The simplest fix is to answer more calls live, which usually means deciding who covers the phone at the times you already know are busy. Where that is not possible, a specific callback promise made on the call itself ("I'll ring you back before three") gives the caller something to hold on to that a ringing phone does not. Keeping that promise is the part that builds the trust the Moneypenny figure is about.

It also helps to stop treating every call as equal. A regular customer confirming a time can wait an hour. A new enquiry probably cannot, and neither can anything urgent. If you know which calls are which before you ring back, you can return the ones that matter first.

That is where Ringar AI helps: it answers every call as it comes in, finds out what the caller needs, and arranges a callback at a time that suits them, with the details written down so you know which calls to return first.