Wendy Schollum: Ignore those e-inquiries at your peril

No one can deny that in the past 10 years there has been an enormous shift in the way businesses interact with their prospective clients. For many businesses, the first contact with a prospect is no longer in person or over the phone, often prospects will choose to initiate proceedings through email, Facebook posts and even tweets. However, due to poor process evolution and team education, unanswered and delayed electronic responses cost New Zealand businesses millions of dollars a year in lost revenue.
Ask any good salesperson if their response time to a phone message can increase or decrease their probability of making a sale and they will tell you yes. This is because they understand that there is nothing more frustrating to a prospect than having a task to complete, needing input from another person (albeit just a quote) and not having them return your call. Not only does the lack of action by this third party stall your work, it also leaves you with a less than complimentary opinion of them and the business that they represent.
However, many of these same salespeople don't understand that exactly the same is true of emails, Facebook posts and tweets. In fact, some employees feel so secure in the assumption that these electronic communications are perceived as an unreliable medium through which to communicate, that they take longer than 24 hours to respond to a message; some even ignore those messages that they don't want to deal with all together.
The problem is that your prospects don't see these means of communication as an unreliable medium. Instead, they see your business as an unreliable communicator when it takes days to get a response. Remember, when a prospect contacts your business they are not only information-finding, they are also testing your customer service. If you take days to respond to them, they will assume that your ongoing service will be the same, and this will weight against you when they come to choose a service provider.
Your electronic customer service needs to be fast, reliable, and accurate. Prospects who experience long waits and inadequate replies are likely to either call a customer service representative the next time they have a problem (giving up on time-saving electronic communications altogether), or go to a competitor.
New Zealand businesses need to ensure that they have electronic communication handling policies in place, to ensure that emails generated by website inquiries (or sent directly to team members), posts made on Facebook and tweets to their business/sales team are answered within 24 hours (if not sooner). They also need to ensure that they set their client's/prospect's expectations by outlining the company's response time policy on their website, email footers and on social media platforms.
If you don't already have clear electronic communication-handling policies in your business, it's time to designate a company-wide response timeframe, ensure your clients/prospects know this and ensure your staff know to use "out of office" replies or email forwarding and notify social media users if they are going to be away from their email for longer than your response timeframe.
Wendy Schollum is a web strategist and managing director of Xplore.net Online Solutions. If you have a web-related question you would like Wendy to answer, please email support@xplore.net, call 0800 100 900 or post to: Xplore.net, PO Box 907, Napier.