How quickly should companies respond to customer email?

I would also suggest making sure that any customer-support or inquiry emails get routed appropriately when they are received. Don't have a single "bucket" for all of them to flow into. By routing things directly to where they need to go right away, they'll probably be addressed more expeditiously.

At my current employer, we have all the usual generic mailboxes - webmaster, admin, etc. For specific areas, we have internal mailboxes/groups that need to see those emails. In some cases, the emails went directly to the appropriate area. In some cases, they went to both the webmaster mailbox and the appropriate area, but those of us watching the webmaster account didn't see the other recipients. In other cases, only the webmaster mailbox would get the email.

As a result of the last 2 cases, there would be lots of finger-pointing and different groups saying "well, the other group has it handled", and ultimately email would get ignored because everyone assumed everyone else was taking care of it. Or, one group would forward the email to another, not realizing that the other group already had a copy.

I've rambled. Summation: All customer service emails should be routed directly to the appropriate area, and each email should go to only one area. If it ends up in a generic mailbox, or the wrong inbox, that person then needs to pass it on to the appropriate party. And hold everyone who receives these emails responsible for addressing them in the right amount of time.

I don't know companies, bute Dave Taylor NEVER answer. I wrote several times and still waiting ...

Interesting response, Caso. Again, I will say that the important issue is that the expectations of the person submitting the question must be properly set by the organization, whether it's a free service such as this site or customer support for a $500 consumer electronics product.

Here's exactly what the question submission page says:

"Because of the volume of e-mail I receive, I can't routinely answer individual questions by e-mail, or consult on individual problems or purchasing decisions. I read all questions I receive, however, then select the best, most interesting, or most common to address on the site."

Even with that, there are always going to be some customers who expect prompt response and will be upset when it doesn't happen. Disappointing, but unless the $50 priority fee is paid to ensure I can allocate the time to respond, there's not much I can do as an unpaid service, Caso.

You suggested, "If you can't get to most messages, then say so, with a notice like "Please check through our FAQ and knowledge base..."

Dave, there is nothing PO's me more than a company suggesting that I look in their FAQs. If my answer were there, most likely, I wouldn't be sending an e-mail, or for that matter calling for support. Maybe I'm in the minority, but, that's the first place I look. Very seldom do I find an answer to my specific inquiry there, but I still look.

While I'm on the subject, what get's me more, are companies that do not list a phone number anywhere on their website and have no explanation for that. At least they could say something like, "Because of our size and the volume of calls we'd get, we cannot do phone support at this time. This is why there are NO contact phone numbers listed on our site."

Just my personal peeves.

Fred, you are very much in the minority. Most people do not want to look for an answer, they want it given to them. Some companies make FAQs hard to find, but even those that do make it easy to find can be troublesome, as you need to know the right way to ask the question to have it answered by a FAQ.

IMO, a FAQ is good, but only in conjunction with a search that will understand that if a person is looking for the answer in a FAQ about what they call their insurance "policy", that the term the company uses is "contract" or "account" and the search should pull up hits for that as well.