What puts people off making an enquiry (and what it quietly costs you)
Here’s the enquiry you never saw.
Someone needed exactly what you do. They found you, or an AI pointed them your way. They were ready: phone in hand, wallet open. Then something small got in the way, and they quietly backed out and rang the next firm on the list. You never knew they were there. No missed call, no email, no notification. Just a job that went to someone else.
It’s almost never the price. Most of the time it’s friction: a slow reply, a phone that rings out, a form that fights them, a website that loads like treacle, or a business that just doesn’t look trustworthy enough to risk. Each one is small on its own. Put together, they cost you more work than any competitor ever will.
So I’ve pulled the actual numbers on the biggest ones. Fair warning before we start: some of this research is a few years old and most of it is American, because that’s where the big studies are. I’ve said so each time and linked the source, because I’m not going to dress a guess up as a fact. But the pattern behind it hasn’t shifted in twenty years, and it’s exactly what I watch happen to local businesses on the Fylde coast every week.
The short version
- Reply in 5 minutes, not 30. Wait half an hour and you’re around 100 times less likely to reach the lead and 21 times less likely to qualify them (MIT / InsideSales, 2007).
- 53% of people leave a mobile page that takes more than 3 seconds to load (Google / SOASTA, 2017). The pages they abandoned loaded in 6.9 seconds on average; the ones they stayed on, 4.5.
- 97% read online reviews, and 31% won’t consider a business rated below 4.5 stars (BrightLocal, 2026).
- None of it is about price. It’s friction, and friction is fixable.
1. You reply too slowly
This is the big one, so it goes first.
The most-quoted study on this comes from MIT and InsideSales (2007), backed up a few years later by Harvard Business Review. They tracked thousands of leads and measured one thing: how fast the business got back to them, and whether it made the difference.
| You reply within | Odds of actually reaching them | Odds of qualifying them |
|---|---|---|
| 5 minutes | baseline | baseline |
| 10 minutes | 5x lower | 4x lower |
| 30 minutes | 100x lower | 21x lower |
Read that bottom row again. Wait half an hour instead of five minutes and you are a hundred times less likely to even get them on the phone. Not a bit less. A hundred times.
What it costs you: the enquiry doesn’t wait. Someone with a leaking pipe or a dead boiler messages three firms and goes with whoever answers first. Slow isn’t “a bit worse”. Slow is invisible, because by the time you get back to them they’ve already booked someone else.
The simple fix: get back to people in minutes, not hours. Even a quick “got your message, I’ll call you within the hour” holds the door open. If you can’t sit by your phone all day, and who can, that’s exactly the job I built Violet, INKON’s AI assistant, to do: answer in seconds, day or night, so nobody’s left waiting on you. There’s more on why this matters so much in the first reply wins.
2. Your website makes them wait
If the reply is one kind of speed, the website is the other. And on a phone, where most local searches happen now, people are ruthless.
Google’s research (with SOASTA, 2017) found that 53% of people abandon a mobile page that takes more than three seconds to load. More than half. Gone before they’ve read a word about you.
And it gets worse the longer they wait. Google compared the pages people bailed on against the ones they stuck with:
| Mobile visits that… | Loaded in (median) |
|---|---|
| Left quickly | 6.9 seconds |
| Stayed | 4.5 seconds |
The pages people gave up on were about two and a half seconds slower than the ones they stayed on. Google also found that as a page goes from one second to seven, the chance of someone bouncing rises by 113%.
What it costs you: every extra second is a slice of your ready customers walking out before they reach the counter. You paid to get them there, in time, or ads, or SEO. A slow site spends all that and hands you nothing back.
The simple fix: a properly built, genuinely fast site. Not a page dragging a bloated theme, a dozen tracking scripts and giant unoptimised images behind it. That’s most of what why your website isn’t getting you enquiries is about, and it’s the first thing we sort when we rebuild one.
3. You don’t give them enough reason to trust you
Say you replied fast and your site loads quick. There’s one gate left: do you look like a safe bet? For a local business, that mostly comes down to reviews.
BrightLocal’s 2026 survey found that 97% of people read online reviews for local businesses, and 49% trust them as much as a personal recommendation from a friend. Reviews are the new word of mouth, near enough.
And people have got fussier about the star rating:
| Customers who will only use a business rated… | Share |
|---|---|
| 4.5 stars or higher | 31% |
| 4 stars or higher | 68% |
Nearly a third now filter out anyone below 4.5 stars before they even look properly. In an earlier BrightLocal survey, 71% said they wouldn’t consider a business rated below three stars at all.
What it costs you: you can do everything else right and still get skipped at the last second because you’ve got four reviews and the firm next to you has forty. The customer never tells you. They just quietly pick the one that looks the safer pair of hands.
The simple fix: keep a steady trickle of genuine reviews coming in, reply to every one, and put real photos of your own work on your site, not stock images of someone else’s van. If you want the how, here’s the way Google now wants you to collect reviews, because the rules changed this year and a lot of businesses are quietly breaking them.
The ones I couldn’t put a clean number on (but you know them anyway)
Three more worth a quick word. I looked for solid data on these and didn’t find any I’d stake my name on, so I’ll not invent it. But I see all three constantly, and none of them need a study to prove:
- The phone that rings out. If someone rings, gets no answer and no callback, they ring the next number. A missed call is a missed customer. If you can’t always pick up, have something that catches it.
- The form that asks too much. Every extra box on a contact form is another reason to give up. Their name, a way to reach them, and what they need. That’s usually plenty. Ask for their life story and half of them close the tab.
- The hidden phone number. If a customer has to hunt for how to reach you, some won’t bother. Phone number in the header, tap-to-call on mobile, an obvious next step on every page.
None of those need data. They just need doing.
What is it costing you?
Enough of other people’s numbers. Here’s a rough one built from yours. Slide in how many enquiries you get a week, what an average job is worth, and how many of them would turn into paying work. It assumes you lose just one in five to the friction above, which is a conservative guess, and shows what that quietly adds up to.
You can’t fix what you can’t see
Strip it right back and every one of them comes down to three things: speed, clarity, trust. Reply fast. Make it effortless to reach you and read you. Look like a safe pair of hands. Do those three and you’ll catch enquiries your competitors never even realise they’re losing.
And that’s the trouble with all of it. Lost enquiries leave no trace. No angry email, no bad review, no missed-call notification. The customer just quietly goes elsewhere, and you never find out they were there.
Want to know where yours are? Get a free audit and I’ll show you where you’re losing them, the slow bits, the friction, the trust gaps, in a short straight breakdown, no meeting required. It’s the sort of thing our monthly plans are built to stay on top of. Either way you’re dealing with me, and I read every message myself, so drop me a line at hello@inkon.co.uk.