Showing responsiveness encourages Yelp users to message your business more, so we show response time and response rate to communicate how quickly and consistently you respond to messages.
Your response time is the median time you took to respond to new messages in the last 30 days, not including After Hours (6pm-8am). If you’d like to respond to messages received during After Hours, any responses sent during the time window are not factored into your overall response time."
Your response rate is the percentage of new messages you responded to in the last 30 days, excluding messages that have just arrived to give you some time to respond.
You can improve your response time and response rate by replying to new customer messages on Yelp or from the email notification as soon as possible. If you’ve responded to the customer through some other means (such as a phone call), you should still mark the message as replied right away.