Companies Ignore Customer Email

So much for good customer service. Articles like this one in Internet Retailer pop up once in a while. Although this story pursues the differences in response rates to emails written in English vs. Spanish, the abysmal response rates are just amazing:

Barely half of the world's best-known brands answer e-mail from consumers...

In the first query, a request for product information got only a 42.7% response rate when submitted in English, and a 46.9% response rate when submitted in Spanish.

The second query, a complaint, got a greater response when submitted in English: 49.4% versus 35.8% for messages sent in Spanish.

The third message, a compliment about the site, got almost equal response rates in Spanish and English: 35.4% and 35.6%, respectively.

The fourth message, a question on where to buy the company's products, got the highest response rate of any of the four messages when sent in English: 50%, but only a 33.3% response when submitted in Spanish.

The top 100 brands included in the survey were drawn from an Interbrand and Business Week study published in 2003 and included global companies such as Colgate, Heineken, Kellogg's, L'Oreal, Toyota and others.

How can companies possibly think that this is acceptable? Is it the fact that email is easy to put off compared to a phone call or a face-to-face encounter? Is it because upper management still doesn't "get it" when it comes to the technology?

An email contact from a customer is just as important as any other moment of truth. Ignoring it is the same as hanging up on a caller or slamming the door in a customer's face.