BigPond best at responding to emails

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 13 September 2006 09:43

IT Industry - Strategy

A survey of how major companies respond to customer communications lodged by email has rated BigPond best among ISPs and best among the 60 companies surveyed. However Telstra Mobilenet lost the top spot in its category to Vodafone. 

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The results come from the latest quarterly email benchmarking survey by customer experience measurement specialists Global Reviews. It sent several thousand emails to the 60 companies over a six-week period and says that "Alarmingly, almost one in five emails did not receive a response at all within seven days."

"These are major Australian and New Zealand companies yet some emails replies were sent from Hotmail addresses, some had the wrong information, others simply sent the customer back to their website where they had just been,'' Global Reviews director, Dr Adir Shiffman, said.

The review measured more than 100 criteria and evaluated companies on their email culture including issues such as response time and the quality of the information provided.

Shiffman said BigPond's score of 74.8 percent indicated that its service was exceeding customer expectations when responding to email enquiries. "Telstra is adding customers at a rate three times faster than its nearest competitor Optus. It is interesting to see that OptusNet ranked in the lower third of companies benchmarked [46.0 percent].''

The ISP rankings were: BigPond 74.8% Internode 63.8%; Chariot 63.6%; TPG 60.3%; WestNet 56.7%; iiNet 55.2%; Dodo 51.0%; OptusNet 46.0%; Unwired 45.4%; iPrimus 43.0%; AAPT 35.7%.

The top four ISPs all rated well in the overall ranking. Internode was 12th, Chariot 13th and TPG 24th overall.

The spread among the four mobile operators surveyed by Global Reviews was much narrower. Leader Vodafone was fifth in the overall ranking with 65.6 percent. Telstra Mobilenet was in 18th place overall with 62.5 percent. Virgin Mobile scored 58.8 percent and Optus Mobiles 55.1 percent.

Shiffman observed that: "Companies spend billions of dollars trying to capture customers via their websites, yet consumers who then send an email seeking more information about products and services are often ignored...A very significant split has developed between those companies who do it well and those that don't."