Promptly Returned or Acknowledged

The American Bar Association’s Model Rule 1.4 requires a lawyer to “promptly comply with reasonable requests for information.” The commentary is specific: “Client telephone calls should be promptly returned or acknowledged.” If a full answer will take time, the lawyer should “acknowledge receipt of the request and advise the client when a response may be expected.”

In Oregon, silence tops the list. The bar’s client assistance office reported: “The number one complaint for 2012 was lack of communication.”

The Short Life of a Sales Lead

In 2011 the Harvard Business Review published “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads” by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington. The authors audited 2,241 American companies and measured how long each took to answer an inquiry from its website.

Of the companies that answered within 30 days, the average response time was 42 hours. Thirty-seven percent answered within an hour, and 23 percent never answered at all. In a separate analysis of 1.25 million leads, firms that answered within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as firms that responded later.

Thirty Minutes or Less

For years, Domino’s promised to deliver a pizza within 30 minutes. By 1986, a late pizza cost the customer $3 less.

Then came the lawsuits. After one crash, a jury in St. Louis awarded a woman $78 million in punitive damages, although she later settled for less. In 1993 Domino’s dropped the 30-minute guarantee in its company-owned stores.

The Thirty-Minute Rule

Under federal rules, an airline flying to, from or within the United States must tell passengers about a cancellation, a diversion or a delay of 30 minutes or more. It must do so “within 30 minutes after the carrier becomes aware of such a change in the status of a flight.” The information must appear at the boarding gate at U.S. airports, on the airline’s website and through its telephone reservation line.

Laboratory Turnaround Time

A report of the National Insitute of Health from November 2007 states:

Quality can be defined as the ability of a product or service to satisfy the needs and expectations of the customer. Laboratories have traditionally restricted discussion of quality to technical or analytical quality, focusing on imprecision and inaccuracy goals.

Clinicians, however, are interested in service quality, which encompasses total test error (imprecision and inaccuracy), availability, cost, relevance and timeliness. Clinicians desire a rapid, reliable and efficient service delivered at low cost.

Of these characteristics, timeliness is perhaps the most important to the clinician, who may be prepared to sacrifice analytical quality for faster turnaround time. This preference drives much of the proliferation of point-of-care testing seen today.

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