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Are Slow Responses to Emails Costing You Sales?
 If
your business receives queries by email,
then you need to make sure that you respond
to them quickly; otherwise, a new survey has
found that you could be pushing your
customers to your competitors.
A staggering 78 per cent of British
consumers have been disappointed by a slow
response to a customer service email
enquiry, with the average consumer sending
three emails before receiving a satisfactory
response, according
to research by
web hosting company
Fasthosts.
The survey of some 1,300 UK consumers showed
that 89 per cent of this group have been led
to defect to a competitor brand as a result.
The 'Fasthosts Customer Service Email Study'
also found that the average British consumer
is only willing to wait up to 24 hours for a
reply, with one in five (19 per cent)
abandoning their enquiry after only 12
hours. Women are more patient than men, with
12 per cent prepared to wait up to a week,
compared with only 7 per cent
of men.
This is concerning news for UK businesses
that receive customer enquiries by email.
More than 30 per cent of consumers surveyed
said they regularly wait three days for a
reply, while nine per cent have waited up to
a week and two per cent reported it can
regularly take up to a month. Interestingly,
men are statistically more likely to receive
a quicker response (21 per cent regularly
receiving a reply within six to 12 hours).
The average consumer (51 per cent of the
survey group) sends three emails before
receiving a satisfactory reply to their
enquiry, while 33 per cent say they have
sent up to 10 emails about a single enquiry.
Of the latter group, men seem to be the most
persistent sex, with 5 per cent more men
than women sending up to ten emails; while
women are more likely to abandon emails in
favour of telephoning the company.
Slow or poor responses to customer service
emails were found to
create
a negative response in over 83 per cent of
consumers – ranging from irritation and
stress (a staggering 84 per cent); to
feeling so angry that they wanted to tell
somebody close by (38 percent);
powerlessness and desperation (27 per cent);
with a further 12 per cent admitting to
outright anger and a desire to address the
situation in person.
95 per cent, approximately 35 million
Britons, claim that their perception of a
business is negatively affected by slow
responses to customer service emails. 89 per
cent of consumers were so annoyed that they
felt compelled to seek out a competitor
business immediately. This seemed to be most
common for larger businesses, with 69 per
cent of consumers surveyed saying their
online customer service was sub-standard;
while one in three Brits said it was small
businesses that most needed to improve their
online customer service skills.
Mark Jeffries, CTO of Fasthosts Internet Ltd
said, “British businesses really need to sit
up and pay attention to their response rate
for customer emails, or risk losing their
customer base to competitor brands. The
public suffers real stress from slow or
sub-standard email replies so it is no
surprise they feel so strongly about the
issue.
When asked to rate online customer service
gripes, 'waiting too long for a useful
reply' and 'automated replies that don’t
answer questions' were joint top gripe (64
per cent each); one in three consumers had
suffered online customer service forms that
had insufficient space to type their request
(35.2 per cent); and 31.5 per cent were
regularly annoyed by the unprofessional
style of responses that they receive.
Jeffries added, "Significantly, our research
highlights that it isn't just the speed of
the response that matters to consumers -
it's how quickly they receive the right
information."
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