Thanks to mobile smartphones with their customisable beeps and whistles and vibrations to give you a jolt in your pocket the moment a message or email comes in, people pretty much expect that when they try to get a hold of you, they can.
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Facebook has added value for its business customers by publicly showing that a certain company page typically replies to messages “within minutes”, or “within an hour” or “within a few hours”. They even give a special highlighted “Very responsive to messages” badge to those who replied within 15 minutes to 90% of all messages received in the last 7 days.
TripAdvisor also tracks response time, based on how long it took business owners to reply to the last 20 messages. They say that businesses responding in six hours or less receive twice as many bookings as those who take longer.
So what is your response time like?
According to global studies, half of all emails get answered within one or two hours.
Tip: If you work primarily in the office close to the computer all day, you might consider aiming for this two-hour goal. Maybe even make a fun office-wide competition out of it. The person to answer the most emails in under two hours during the month wins something.
After two days, studies show that people stop looking for a reply from you. By then, the time horizons have come and gone for all reasonable delays like time zone differences, you were out at a meeting, you were travelling that day, or maybe you ran out of time. The only logical reason left is that you do not care to reply to them.
After two days, studies show people stop looking for a reply from you.
In a trip-planning situation, stopping looking for a reply from you does not mean stopping the planning. Instead, they have perhaps moved on to research hiking tours with your competitor or maybe they contacted a travel agent because they experienced this several times and decided it was simply too hard to reach the local operators directly.
Tip: If a two-hour reply time is asking too much, make sure you at least reach the two-day reply time. The more time that passes, the more likely the person will lose interest in your company. In other words, they are a missed business opportunity. And if an international agent is on the other end of an unanswered mail, they represent hundreds of missed business opportunities.
Also according to global studies, the most common email reply time is two minutes. Now, I am willing to bet that auto-replies have a heavy effect on this statistic, but speaking of…
Tip: An auto-reply is a good way to communicate a basic message quickly. Although it is impersonal and people know that, at least they get an explanation to expect a delayed reply. If you are frequently away from the computer because you work both in the office and as a guide, for example, an auto-reply saying exactly this and giving an estimate for when you will be back goes a long way.
