That's a lot of loaded questions and some in the industry have written books about.
I train our sales people to ALWAYS read the comments and transcript. Why would anyone NOT read such vital information in order to respond most effectively??
[USER=4677]@Steve Stauning[/USER] was on RefreshFriday last week and shared some great worktracks that could be incorporated into your email responses - AND TEXT.
We try to send an initial text response every lead, resulting in an average 30-40% response rate. Room to improve. We also use autoipacket in our responses and generic follow-up.