Sending an e-mail to a company of which you are a client, and not receiving a reply, has happened to practically everyone once in a while. This has now been corroborated by a recent study, in which only six out of the 72 companies targeted replied to all e-mail requests.
In an 18-say study conducted by the German e-commerce research institute ECC Handel and ItyX, the reaction of 72 companies belonging to different sectors to the reception of a test e-mail request was studied. Only six out of the 72 companies targeted replied to all e-mail requests.
But the results of the study reflect something even more serious: two of the companies did not reply to any of the e-mails that they received. Around 72% of the companies sent replied written by employees, while 25% sent automatic replies.
As to the time they took to reply, the majority were not that quick off the mark. A little under half of the companies replied to e-mail requests on the same day, 23% did so in two days, and 29% need three or more to reply. This does not live up to clients’ expectations, who expect to receive a reply in a couple of hours after e-mailing their request.
Generally speaking, companies taking longest to reply were those belonging to the telecommunications industry, since only 18% replied to requests on the same day that they received them.
