E-mail customer service responsiveness gets worse, Jupiter reports
Of the 92% of web sites offering e-mail as a customer-support option, only 41% acknowledge receipt of customers’ messages with an automated e-mail response, according to a new report from JupiterResearch.
Jupiter also found that the number of sites meeting a 24-hour threshold for e-mail response continues to decline, with only 45% of sites resolving e-mail inquiries within 24 hours. The most significant trend, however, was that 39% of sites took three days or longer to reply or sent no response at all, according to the report. The number of these sites has grown from 35% in December 2003.
“Failure to resolve requests via e-mail is driving continued use of cost-intensive telephone work, negating any potential cost savings from handling inquiries via e-mail,” says David Schatsky, senior vice president of research. He notes that consumers call contact centers when their e-mails go unanswered.
“This continued rise of unresponsiveness does not bode well for customer satisfaction, which ironically is a top driver of investment in most customer-service related technology,” Schatsky said.
Increasing e-mail volume and the broad failure of contact centers to invest in appropriate e-mail handling technology to handle the larger volume are factors contributing to the unresponsiveness, Jupiter said.
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