Okay, so you’ve built your Web site and invited customers and potential customers to visit. Does that mean you can sit back?
Unfortunately, it seems some e-commerce sites are doing just that. In a recent study, the New York-based online research organization Jupiter Research found that nearly half of all top-ranked Web sites took longer than five days to respond to e-mail inquiries or never responded at all. That’s a big no-no, according to Jupiter, which argues that the standard for customer service on the Web is higher, not lower, than for traditional mediums.
Among its suggestions: that customer service sites include some kind of “auto-acknowledge” feature, which can acknowledge having received the message and estimates of the time frame for a substantive response.