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Responsiveness

Companies took 73 times longer than the 10 minutes customers expect to answer an email

In a test of 1,000 companies, 62% never answered a customer email, and the others took 12 hours 10 minutes on average. Set against what customers call an immediate reply, the gap is large.

Ben Tannenbaum

Ben Tannenbaum, Founder, Javo

Published · 4 min read

Email feels like a safe channel: the request is written, nothing gets lost. In practice, many businesses answer late, or not at all.

What SuperOffice measured

In 2018, SuperOffice sent a customer service email to 1,000 companies and timed the answers.

  • 62% never replied.
  • 90% did not acknowledge receipt.
  • The average response time was 12 hours 10 minutes.

Set against what customers expect

The same year, HubSpot asked 1,000 consumers what “immediate” means: 62% put it at 10 minutes or less for a sales question. The average measured by SuperOffice is 73 times that.

Out of 100 emails sentResult
No reply at all62
A reply, after 12 h 10 min on average38

Closing the gap

  • Acknowledge every request straight away, with a realistic time for the full answer.
  • Answer the frequent questions without waiting: a chat agent can do this at any hour.
  • Keep email for what needs thought, and track how long your replies really take.

Sources

  1. SuperOffice, “Customer Service Benchmark Report”, 2018
  2. HubSpot, “Live chat and the go-to-market flaw”, with results of the 2018 Consumer Customer Support Survey
Ben Tannenbaum

The author

Ben Tannenbaum

Founder, Javo

Ben founded Javo. He is also the founder and CEO of Aiso, which analyses real conversations between people and AI assistants at scale, and before that built a pricing-data startup for coworking spaces. He studied statistics.

LinkedIn profile

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