June 23, 2005

As a whole, many B2B companies are doing little to interact with customers via email, extranets or other means of Internet communications. However, things could begin to change real soon. On June 27, a study released by Customer Respect will show that, of one hundred B2B portals, 58 percent of them answered their email queries within the same day.

Only 15 percent of all online queries went ignored, and it is a telling statement about online customer service that the "only" is warranted.

By comparison, Pizza Hut has a goal of answering 97 or 98 percent of its telephone calls, and holds employees accountable to that standard.

Obviously, many enterprises have gotten the message that ignoring e-mails is simply leaving money on the table. But it's taking a while for call center bigotry to embrace the value of the online customer. Jupiter Research found a 54 percent one-day e-mail response rate for enterprises two years ago, so it seems as if e-mail responsiveness is growing by only a few percentage points each year.

Consumers are changing faster than enterprises might expect, especially now that VoIP is hitting the mainstream. VoIP users are trained to think of the telephone and the Internet as part and parcel of the same connectivity, unlike previous users who could draw a clear line between the technologies. With communication technologies uniting like this, consumers will inevitably demand the same standard of service across all channels.

Here's who's getting the message, according to Customer Respect:

Top 10 Performers

1 Hewlett-Packard Company
2 Medco Health Solutions
3 Sprint Corporation
4 Intel
5 American Express Company
6 United Parcel Service, Inc.
7 Bank of America Corporation
8 Microsoft Corporation
9 Dell Computer Corporation
10 Wachovia Securities

Here are companies that did'nt get it right:

Bottom 10 Performers

91 Wellpoint Health Networks, Inc.
92 Johnson Controls, Inc.
93 Marathon Oil Corporation
94 Plains All American Pipeline, L.P.
95 Northrop Grumman Corporation
96 The Boeing Company
97 Weyerhaeuser Company
98 Honeywell International Inc.
99 Morgan Stanley
100 Berkshire Hathaway

It's important to remember that responsiveness was just one element of the Customer Respect study, which also touches on issues like usability and the presence of self-service components like FAQs.

In conclusion, there's incremental good news in this year's report. Now if only smaller businesses would get aboard the online channel express.

Source: Line 56