Short answer: during office hours, within 5 to 15 minutes. After hours, an instant automatic acknowledgment, then a real reply first thing in the morning. Every hour slower costs bookings.
Why does reply speed decide bookings?
A new patient in pain rarely contacts one clinic. They search, open a few websites, and send two or three inquiries. The first clinic that answers their question clearly is usually the one that gets the booking. The rest never hear back.
The best-known research on this is the Lead Response Management study from InsideSales.com and MIT. Across hundreds of thousands of web leads, the odds of even reaching the person dropped sharply after the first hour, and the odds of qualifying them fell several times over when the reply took 30 minutes instead of 5. That study covered sales leads, but a new-patient inquiry behaves the same way: the person is comparing options right now, not tomorrow.
What does fast look like for a real front desk?
You don't need someone watching the inbox all day. You need three things working together:
- An instant acknowledgment. An automatic reply that lands within a minute, confirms the message arrived, and answers something real: your hours, your new-patient price, how booking works. A bare "we'll get back to you" is better than silence, but not by much.
- A real reply within the hour during office hours. One named person owns web inquiries. Not "the team" - one person, with a backup for lunch and days off.
- An after-hours plan. Evenings and weekends are when working patients actually write. The automatic reply carries the load until morning, and the morning reply goes out before the phones open.
What should the reply say?
Answer the question they asked. If they asked about price and availability, give the price range and the next open slots, and make booking one tap or one sentence. "Please call us to schedule" is not a reply - it's a chore handed back to someone who chose to write instead of call.
Do you know your clinic's actual reply time?
Most clinics don't. The way to find out is to send a realistic inquiry from an address your team won't recognize and time what happens: when the acknowledgment lands, when the real reply arrives, and whether it answers the question. Do it once on a Tuesday morning and once on a Friday at 4 PM.
Or let a tool do it. First Answer's free reply test sends one realistic patient inquiry through your form, times the reply for up to 72 hours, and shows you what it said and one thing to fix.