26% of retailers fail to reply to customer e-mail inquiries

Yet more amazing statistics in Internet Retailer about knucklehead customer service when it comes to responding to customer email. I wrote about this a few weeks ago when another study came out. Here are a couple tidbits:

Although more than a quarter, or 26%, of retailers failed to respond to e-mail inquiries from customers seeking to make a purchase, the retail industry outperformed the cross-industry response rate of 41% in a recent study by Benchmark Portal and sponsored by eGain Communications Corp....40% of online-only businesses, a category that includes online recruiters and shopping comparison sites, also failed to reply to customer e-mail inquiries.