43% of companies are only reachable on working days, during office hours
57% address email inquiries within a 12-hour timeframe
97% offer social media as a channel, but take over 24 hours to respond
In the world of e-commerce, customer service plays an important role in shaping the overall customer experience. Relationships lack the personal touch found in traditional retail. The slightest friction can transform a positive experience into a negative one, think of long response times and not being available whenever the customers need you. Salesupply partnered with Zaufane.pl, GetNoticed and the University of Zielona Góra to put the customer service of the top 100 largest and 75 medium-sized online stores in Poland to the test:
- When were customer service teams available for the customer?
- What channels do they offer for customer service?
- How long did it take for them to respond?
Opening times: be there when the clients are shopping
Meeting customers’ needs when they are shopping is essential, to gain a competitive advantage over those companies who don’t. Still, only 6% of examined stores has customer service available during the peak evening shopping hours. This might result in potential customers leaving your store for a website that does have their customer service available. A large part of examined stores – 43% – are opened on working days, during working hours.
Waiting time customer service: patience is still required
Response time phone
The phone is still the most used customer service channel, also in Poland. That should mean customer service teams optimised their processes for phone inquiries. How did the examined stores do? The results were mixed. Where a large group reacted in under 60 seconds, 19% of the stores will let the customer wait for over a minute and a half. Additionally, 6% of the companies did not respond to calls altogether.
Response time e-mail
A majority of the tested stores (57%), address email inquiries within a 12-hour timeframe. This is an encouraging sign of prioritizing communication. On the other hand, almost 1 in 5 stores (18%) did not respond to the emails of their customer at all!
Most companies – 97% – offer social media as a channel. More than half of the examined companies took a little over 24 hours to respond on this channel.
WhatsApp has yet to gain widespread recognition as a customer service channel in Poland, with only 8 out of 175 surveyed companies facilitating customer contact through this messenger.
Focus on being accesible
Based off this research, we recommend expanding opening hours and shorten waiting times. This way, your business is available when the customer needs you the most: during peak shopping hours.
You can download the entire report in Polish here.
