Quote response time calculator
Paste when requests arrived and when quotes went out, and see how fast your team really responds.
Distribution
Lines not counted
How this calculator works
For every quote, response time is the gap between when the request arrived and when your quote went out. The tool parses each line, throws out the ones it can't read (and tells you why), and summarizes the rest. Nothing leaves your browser.
Response time = sent − received
Median = the middle response time when all are sorted (average of the two middle values for an even count)
90th percentile = the value 90% of the way through the sorted list, interpolated between neighbors
Within target = quotes with response time ≤ target ÷ quotes measured × 100
Why the median, not the average
One request that sat over a long weekend can drag the average up by hours while the typical customer experience didn't change. The median tells you what a typical shipper waits. The 90th percentile tells you what your slowest one in ten waits, which is usually where lost deals live. Watch both.
Calendar hours or business hours?
Calendar hours are what the shipper experiences: a request sent Friday at 4:50 PM and answered Monday at 9:20 AM waited about 64.5 hours. Business hours only count time inside your working day, Monday to Friday. With an 8:00 to 18:00 day, that same quote took 2.5 business hours: 70 minutes on Friday afternoon and 80 minutes on Monday morning.
- A request that arrives outside hours starts the clock at the next opening.
- A request received and answered entirely outside hours counts as zero business time.
- Weekends count as closed. Public holidays are not excluded, so remove those rows or read the slowest results with that in mind.
- Distribution buckets use whichever measure you pick. In business-hours mode, “1–3 days” means 24–72 business hours, which is several working days. Each bucket includes its upper edge, so exactly 1 hour falls in “≤ 1h”.
The pre-filled rows are invented to show the formats and edge cases: an overnight request, a Thursday-to-Monday quote, a Saturday request and one line where the sent time is before the received time, so you can see how rejections are reported. They are not a benchmark.
What this calculator does not cover
- Time zones. All times are read as local wall-clock times in a single zone, and daylight-saving changes are ignored. If your received and sent times come from systems in different zones, convert them first.
- Holidays and custom schedules. Business hours are Monday to Friday only.
- Requests never answered. A quote that was never sent has no response time, so it can't be in this data at all. Count those separately; they matter more than the slow ones.
- Quality. A fast wrong quote is still wrong. Pair this with your win rate; see how to measure 3PL quote win rate.
Why the number matters, and what usually slows it down, is covered in why freight quotes take three days. If you'd like to compare notes with other US 3PLs, the quote response time benchmark survey is collecting data now.
Most of a slow response is the request waiting in an inbox for someone to read it, find the rate and type it up. With Rapid Ai 10x, Adriana reads the request as it arrives, prices it against your rate card and has a draft quote ready within minutes, and a person on your team reviews and approves it before anything goes out. See the quoting agent.
Common questions
For each quote, subtract the time the request arrived from the time the quote was sent. Export both timestamps from your inbox, CRM or TMS, paste them here, and look at the median and the 90th percentile rather than the average.
Both. Calendar hours show what the shipper experienced. Business hours show how quickly your team acted during the time it was working. A big gap between the two usually means requests arriving late in the day or on weekends.
No. Everything is calculated in your browser, and nothing you paste is sent to Rapid Ai 10x or anyone else. Closing the page clears it.
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