BY NESLIN GEORGE · FOUNDER, MEXABUILD
Why five minutes, and not thirty?
Because the person who called is still holding the phone. Within five minutes they are where they were, thinking about what they were thinking about, and yours is the only number they have dialled. Within thirty they have dialled the next one. The study is usually credited to Harvard because the Harvard Business Review wrote it up in 2011; the work was Oldroyd's, and the figure is the same either way.
A tow is the clearest case. It is bought at the worst moment of somebody's day, by phone, in a hurry, from a person who cannot say where they are. In the middle of the night there is no shopping around — the caller takes the first company that answers and gives a time. The calls a tired owner misses on the fourth ring are the ones that would have paid best.
What does the rule mean for a desk that is already busy?
That the two jobs compete for the same person. Taking new work and reassuring existing customers are both urgent, but only one of them earns anything, and the one that earns is the one that hangs up and calls a competitor. A dispatcher mid-call with somebody asking where their car is cannot also answer in five minutes. Neither can an owner who is driving, or asleep.
The usual fix is one more thing for the dispatcher to remember, and it works until the week the phones are busiest, which is the week it was for.
How does a desk answer first without hiring a night shift?
Every call is answered at once, whatever the hour: the situation captured, the caller told a truck is coming, and a person woken only when a rule says so — a police request, a caller in danger, a job outside the area. Location is captured once, as a pin from the caller's phone or an exit number, and passed to the driver as an address, so the truck is moving while the desk is still talking. A time goes out by text the moment the truck is assigned and is updated from where the truck actually is, so the caller waits for you instead of phoning around.
Dispatch decisions stay with the person who knows the trucks and the drivers. The system does not pick which unit goes and does not replace dispatch software; it answers, locates, updates and collects on top of what the desk already runs.
What is answering first worth on your desk?
Calls a week, how many you catch, how many become a run, and what a run is worth. The missed-call model below works from those four and nothing else. The study says what the odds do when the answer comes inside five minutes; only your numbers say what that is worth to you.
Source: Oldroyd, MIT Sloan / InsideSales, 2007 — 15,000+ leads and 100,000+ call attempts; commonly misattributed to Harvard. Read the study → Published research, not our results.