Arise Customer Service Frustrations: Email Response Times

For customer service channels, Microsoft reports that the second most popular customer service channel is email, with 62% of respondents indicating it's their channel of choice.  With these trends showing email is a “must-support” channel for customer service, it’s more important than ever that organizations set service levels to ensure they are meeting customer expectations around response times.  

According to Toister data, expectations are growing for more immediate response. The number of people expecting a response in 15 minutes has increased from 4% to 14.5%.  Has this trend continued into 2019? Arise sought to find out.

Methodology

Arise conducted a Google Consumer Survey of over 1,500 U.S. consumers and asked them, “When contacting customer service via email, how quickly do you expect a response?”  Respondents could select one of the following intervals:

• Immediately
• Within 1 hour
• Longer than 1 hour, but within 24 hours
• Longer than 24 hours, but within 48 hours
• Longer than 48 hours

These time intervals were shown randomly, reversing answer order to maintain survey structure.

Overall Results: How Soon Do Customers Expect an Email Response?

Of customers that report using email for customer service:

• Over 80% of customers expect a response within 24 hours
• 96% of customers expect a response within 48 hours
• 16% of customers expect an immediate response
• 37% expect a response within 1 hour
• Only 4% of respondents expected a response time of longer than 2 days

The most popular interval chosen was a response time between one hour and 24 hours, which is consistent with Boomerang data (via FastCompany). 

Email Use as a Customer Service Channel

Our survey also showed that 79% of survey respondents use email as a customer service channel.  This stat is consistent with Microsoft’s Global Customer Service Report which also showed that 78% of U.S. customers used email on a regular basis.

No Response At All?

Only 3% of all respondents believed that if they contacted customer service via email, they would never receive a response.

Results By Age Group

Results were largely varied by age group, but there were some interesting data points to note. As one would likely expect, the older demographics reported not using email for customer service more often than younger respondents:

Of the 35-44 age group, 21.7% of those using email customer service expected an immediate response, which was much higher than the percentage expecting an immediate response of all other groups. As the group that uses email customer service the most, it is interesting to observe the 18-24 age group using email customer service had the highest percentage of consumers expecting a response in longer than 48 hours (8.5%).  The 18-24 group also reported the highest rate for believing they would not receive a response to their email (4.3%), which were more than any other group.

Age Group	Immediate	Less than 1 hr	Greater than 1 hr, within 24 hrs	Greater than 24 hrs. within 48 hrs	Longer than 48 hrs
18-24	13.1%	23.0%	38.5%	16.9%	8.5%
25-34	16.6%	19.0%	45.0%	17.5%	1.8%
35-44	21.7%	19.1%	41.7%	12.7%	4.8%
45-54	12.8%	22.3%	47.9%	11.3%	5.8%
55-64	16.6%	23.6%	41.2%	16.9%	1.6%
65+	11.7%	21.0%	46.5%	17.0%	3.8%