Mark Albright reported in the St Petersburg Times on statistics from Jupiter Research showing the length of time companies are taking to respond to email sent to customer service has increased significantly and 55% of companies with on line customer service take longer than 24 hours to respond. Even more alarming, nearly 40% of all such emails take three days or more for a response or are never answered at all.
In several previous articles I have detailed the opportunities for companies to grow revenue and profits by capturing and using the contact information of their customers and visitors. Now, we learn just how poorly companies are doing responding to customers who need help.
There is a major revenue building opportunity by just responding to the customers with questions and by using the customer contact information to develop a positive communication campaign. These two actions are the foundation of my Local Retail Marketing program which is a component of the Revenue module of The Profit System. But forget all those titles, this is just common business sense. All you have to do is not repeat the mistakes obviously being made by many companies out there and the biggest problem you will have is where do you want to park your yacht.
P.S. When you combine emails not being answered with first the long wait times customers experience when calling customer service and second with how poorly many of the calls are handled when once the phone is answered, the roadmap that you should follow is very clear.
