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...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?
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.