How quickly do you respond to sales inquiries that arrive via email? How about support issues? Stop for a minute and really think about your answer to these questions. Can you quantify them? If phrases like, “pretty fast” and “we’re not so bad” are the best you can do, then you’re like most companies.

In fact, you might be better than most. A study of small and medium-sized North American companies revealed that 51% of businesses never responded to emails with high-value purchase intent. A more recent study by Hornstein Associates shows a steady decline in customer service response rates since 2002. In 2007, only 33% of companies responded to emails sent to customer service within 24 hours, down almost half from a high of 63% in 2002.

Thanks to BoldMail, a rich email management feature inside of our SMB and Enterprise product offerings, I am able to say that:

• In April, our average response time to sales inquiries was under 6 hours, and
• For the same time period, our average resolution time for support issues was ~21 hours.

Another BoldChat customer, SalesNexus, did even better. They post continuously updated results of their response times on their website. They get this data directly from the BoldChat system within seconds.

There are so many reasons why email programs like Outlook are perfect for managing individual email accounts. There are even more reasons why a solution tailored for individuals is a bad fit for sales and support teams.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Customer Service, Email Management, Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.