The Report the Whole Team Was Proud Of
Thursday morning, the team lead pulled everyone into a quick briefing and put the dashboard up on screen: "Average response time to clients — 42 seconds. Best in the market among agencies in the region this month."
A ripple of approval went through the room. Someone clapped. Marina smiled too — it was a good number, and part of it was hers: she answered fast almost every time, and she was proud of that.
While the team lead moved on to the next slide, she thought back to one case from that same week. It hadn't made it into any report.
Forty Seconds That Turned Out to Be Wrong
On Tuesday, a client had asked her about a two-bedroom on the third floor. Marina answered in forty seconds — fast, confident, reading straight off the file that was open in front of her.
An hour later, he wrote back: he'd called the developer directly, and they'd told him that unit sold three days ago. Marina opened the same file — last modified a week ago. It looked current. It just wasn't.
She'd answered fast. She'd answered wrong. On the dashboard, those forty seconds still counted as a win.
Two Things She'd Been Treating as One
Marina caught herself realizing she'd never actually separated these two things before. "Answering fast" and "answering correctly" had always sounded like the same quality — just what it meant to be a good agent.
Response speed came down to her: how quickly she reached for her phone, how closely she watched the chats. She had that covered — the dashboard proved it.
Whether the answer was right depended on something else entirely: whether the file she opened had any way of telling her it had gone stale. Most of hers didn't. They looked just as convincing on the day they were created as they did a month after they'd stopped being true.
Praise With a Blind Spot
After the briefing, Marina stayed in the meeting room a little longer than everyone else, looking at the 42 still up on the screen. It was a nice number. It just didn't say anything about how many of those fast replies she'd had to walk back later with an awkward "sorry, turns out the current info is different."
A good response time doesn't stop a client from second-guessing an agent's competence. It doesn't cover the extra time spent explaining the discrepancy. It doesn't stop a deal from slipping away — just a little later than it did on Monday, for the exact same reason.
Fast replies do not fix broken distribution.
What This Story Is Really About
Response time measures how attentive a team is. Data freshness measures whether what they're saying can actually be trusted. Those are two different things, and scoring well on one says nothing about the other.
Author
This material was written by Maria Vashchenko.
For questions, collaboration, or further discussion, feel free to contact me on LinkedIn.
