The Metro Detroit Response Index
How fast do this region's service businesses answer the people trying to pay them? Nobody measures it. Starting now, we do.
What it is
The Response Index is a recurring benchmark of speed-to-lead in metro Detroit, built from real Response Tests: owner-requested inquiries sent through each business's own website, with every touch timestamped. Not a survey. Not self-reported. Measured.
Each edition reports, in aggregate:
- Time to acknowledgment — how long before the lead hears anything
- Time to first human reply — how long before a real answer arrives
- Follow-up rate — how many businesses ever touch the lead a second time
- The 5-Minute Club — the share of businesses that meet the standard the research has pointed at for years: respond inside five minutes or watch your odds of qualifying the lead collapse
The methodology, in plain English
- An owner requests a test — we never test a business without its owner's request.
- One realistic, clearly non-urgent inquiry goes through the business's own website during business hours.
- We log three timestamps: acknowledgment, first human reply, and any follow-up within 72 hours.
- The business gets its private scorecard. The Index gets the anonymous numbers.
Privacy is structural: the Index publishes aggregates only. No business is ever named without written consent. Your scorecard is yours.
Edition One
Edition One publishes after our first twenty tests, and quarterly after that. Early signal from the broader research: most service businesses take hours to days to respond — while the buyer is calling the next name on the list.
Want your numbers in before the benchmark goes public? Request your free Response Test — 10 per week, metro Detroit service businesses.
Want each edition when it drops? Subscribe to The Monday Brief — the Index ships inside it.
The Index is maintained by Binary Rogue, the Detroit systems company behind the Owner Command Center — built so that the businesses on the right side of this benchmark stay there automatically.