The original title is "Speed-to-lead is an engineering problem: winning the job in under 2 seconds"

Short summary

Speed-to-lead is an engineering challenge for home-service businesses, where responding in under 2 seconds across six channels (Yelp, Thumbtack, Facebook, Instagram, Google LSA) dramatically increases booking rates. The article breaks down the technical requirements: normalizing diverse lead inputs, intent parsing, scheduled follow-ups, missed-call voice callbacks, and clean CRM handoff. The author discloses affiliation with Auto-Respond, an AI tool that implements this stack.

• •MIT research shows waiting 5-30 minutes to respond makes you 100x less likely to reach a lead
• •Sub-2-second response requires orchestrating webhooks, intent parsing, and multi-channel sends within tight latency budgets
• •Idempotency, stop-logic, and voice callback reliability are the hidden engineering challenges

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