Social media is outclassing email as the quickest form of customer service, according to two new reports.
Customers have come to expect increasingly speedy and efficient responses to email requests.
However, 59% of organisations take more than eight hours – or one full working day – to respond, according to customer service specialist KANA Software.
The time delay is even greater in some businesses, with more than one quarter (26.5 per cent) taking 24 hours or more to reply to customers.
By contrast, the average response time on Twitter is 5.1 hours, with 10 percent of companies answering within one hour, according to a recent report by social media analytics company Simply Measured.
Companies have become more assuming that customers are utilising social media activity according to KANA, whereas customers have expressed a desire to continue using emails in significant volumes to lodge their feedback.
Steven Thurlow, head of product strategy for KANA Software, said: “Organisations must remain aware of the continued role email plays within customer service.
“Social customer service is very much the ‘now,’ yet the vast majority of customers still, and will for the foreseeable future, chose to interact with organisations via email. It need not become a second-class citizen to more modern digital channels but, rather, email can fill a dedicated role within robust and highly responsive customer service strategies.”