Who’s not answering e-mail: you’d be surprised
Barely half of the world’s best-known brands answer e-mail from consumers, according to a report from consultants Common Sense Advisory. The company contacted the brands using either their info@ e-mail address or web forms supplied on corporate web sites, using four different types of messages: a request for product information, a compliment about the web site, a minor complaint about it, and a question on where to buy the company’s products.
To gauge how well the brands responded to the growing U.S. Latino community, researchers sent the same questions to the brand sites in Spanish as well as English. The results, according to researchers at Common Sense, “demonstrate that many companies have yet to capitalize on these opportunities in English and seriously call into question their ability to respond to messages sent to their global gateways in Spanish or any other language.”
In the first query, a request for product information got only a 42.7% response rate when submitted in English, and a 46.9% response rate when submitted in Spanish. The Spanish language response was also returned quicker, in an average 2 days versus 2.9 days in English. The second query, a complaint, got a greater response when submitted in English – 49.4% versus 35.8% for messages sent in Spanish. Response time for English averaged 1.6 days versus 3.8 days in Spanish.
The third message, a compliment about the site, got almost equal response rates in Spanish and English – 35.4% and 35.6%, respectively. The average response time was 1.8 days for Spanish messages and 3.1 for those in English. The fourth message, a question on where to buy the company’s products, got the highest response rate of any of the four messages when sent in English—50%—but only a 33.3% response when submitted in Spanish. The average response time was 1.7 days in English and 2.8 days for messages sent in Spanish.
“Whether we look at English or Spanish, the percentages speak volumes about the low priority that global brands place on web-originated transactions,” the report states. Among the suggested best practices to improve response to web-based customer queries, the report discusses automated query acknowledgements, posting a separate e-mail address next to the English info@ e-mail address for Spanish-speaking consumers, and improving the design of web forms.
The top 100 brands included in the survey were drawn from an Interbrand and Business Week study published in 2003 and included global companies such as Colgate, Heineken, Kellogg’s, L’Oreal, Toyota and others.
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