Quick answer
When Casey's Instant Connect turns a lead into a real exchange, those leads book up to 14 times more often than when the connection never lands — and about 9 times more often averaged across a full year. Speed determines whether an exchange can happen; the exchange itself is what books the job.
Every article about lead response speed cites the same two sources: the MIT/InsideSales Lead Response Management Study and the Harvard Business Review piece built on it. Both are good. Both are also from 2007 and 2011, and neither is specific to home services.
They also measure only one thing — how fast you make contact. Running lead response across Yelp, Angi, Thumbtack, Google Local Services Ads, Meta and web forms has made the limits of that framing clear.
Replying fast is not the same as connecting
Speed gets you into the thread. Whether that becomes a real exchange is a separate problem, and it is the one that decides whether the job gets booked.
When Casey's Instant Connect turns a lead into a real exchange, those leads book up to 14 times more often than when the connection never lands. Averaged across a full year rather than a peak month, the difference is about 9 times.
A business can hit every speed benchmark in the classic research and still lose the work, because replying quickly and being ready to engage are different capabilities. Most tools solve the first one. The gap between them is where lost jobs actually live.
Why the five-minute rule does not apply evenly
The other thing the classic studies cannot tell you is that platforms do not behave the same way, so the same response process produces very different results depending on where the lead came from.
- Angi shares each lead with several pros at once, so the first meaningful response usually takes the job. Speed outweighs polish here.
- Thumbtack shows customers your response time next to competing pros, which makes a delay visible at the exact moment they choose.
- Yelp publishes your response rate on your profile. Slow is public and permanent. Yelp also passed no customer phone number at all until April 2026, and now passes one on roughly half of leads — so on the rest, the number still has to come out of the conversation before anyone can call.
- Google LSA factors responsiveness into where you rank, so a missed call costs you twice: the job now, and placement later.
- Meta lead ads decay fastest of all. The person filled in a form mid-scroll rather than going looking for a contractor, so intent is lower and the window is shorter.
- Website forms have no external scoreboard at all, which is exactly why they are usually the slowest source in a contractor's mix. Nothing shames you for being late.
Around two thirds of Meta lead ads arrive outside standard business hours, against under a third of Google LSA leads. Your real response time is set by your slowest channel, not your fastest — and a tool that performs brilliantly on one platform while three others go unwatched has narrowed the problem rather than fixed it.
What this means in practice
Three things follow from it.
Judge yourself on exchanges, not response times. A five-second reply that never becomes a real exchange is a metric, not a booked job. If you track one number, track how many leads you genuinely engaged.
Do not treat every lead the same. The right moment to reach a Meta lead that came in at 9pm is not the right moment to reach a Google LSA lead at 10am. This is the part Casey's Instant Connect is built around — reading where each lead actually is and acting at the moment that matters, rather than treating every lead on every platform identically.
Fix the quiet channel first. It is almost always the website form, because no platform is publishing your response rate on it.
The bottom line
The five-minute rule is still right. It is just incomplete. Speed opens the door; what happens after it is what fills the calendar. On what we see across six platforms, the operators winning work are not simply the fastest — they are the ones who are actually there when the moment arrives.
For how each platform behaves in detail, see Yelp, Angi, Thumbtack, Google LSA, Meta and web forms, or the wider research on lead response time statistics.
About this data: based on Casey production data across home service businesses in 2026. The 14x figure is a strong month; the year-round average is nearer 9x, which is the number to use if you only want one. Businesses that engage leads quickly tend to differ in other ways too, so treat this as a strong association rather than proof of cause.