Big Businesses Are Ignoring Your Online Enquiries

30 Jul 08

Enquiries sent using the Contact Us link are being ignored by 59% of large businesses, according to a new survey.

The online contacts for 460 Australian organisations – those that employ 100 or more people – were tested by researchers for contact centre company Strike Force Sales.

The researchers entered specific product enquiries into each organisations online contact form or the enquiries were sent to their nominated email address to simulate a genuine enquiry form a customer. After 7 days the researchers had not received a response from 59% of the businesses contacted.

On average, those that did respond took an average of one day and 8.5 hours to get back to the "customer". Only six per cent responded with a phone call an average three days after being contacted.

Almost half of the automated email responses promising a real reply were never followed up.

The survey, conducted across a range of organisations, found the least-responsive industries were in construction and retail.

"Given the importance of the internet to the modern economy it verges on negligence for any business not to respond to web-generated enquiries,” said Chris Moriarty, managing director of Strike Force Sales.

"They're not taking it seriously."

While this survey was conducted on large businesses, the lessons for small businesses are just as important. Are you letting your potential customers down by not responding to their contact enquiries?

Several small manufacturers with poor records for responding to emails were contacted by ManufactureLink to find out the reasons why they fail to follow up with online enquiries.

All respondents said they tended to ignore their enquiries emails as their inbox was constantly full of spam and unsolicited emails and they felt they just didn't have the time to sort through them to find the genuine enquiries.

Is this true for your manufacturing business? In the current competitive climate and downturn in the Australian manufacturing industry can you afford to be ignoring your potential customers?

There is no doubting that the internet is the most powerful tool for presenting your company profile and attracting new customers. Many manufacturers, even very small businesses spend up big on creating effective websites to try and bring in new customers as well as advertising with leading online manufacturing marketplaces such as ManufactureLink. But all of that investment is wasted if enquiries are not responded to, and not responded to quickly.

If spam is burying your online enquiries, what can you do about it, and what methods can you use to ensure you respond to genuine enquiries quickly? There are a number of strategies you can use to firstly reduce your amount of spam, and secondly to deliver only genuine enquiries to the right staff who can deal with them. The following will explain some of the techniques you can use.

Firstly look at the way your online enquiry forms and email addresses are published. What are known as 'web crawlers' are constantly searching the internet for any published email address they can find. So the first rule is to not publish your email addresses on your website. Instead look at using contact forms or publish your email addresses in a format that a crawler can't recognise (e.g. fred (at) mycompany.com). Humans will recognise the correct address, but a crawler will not.

But using a contact form doesn't completely protect you from spam. There are also what are known as 'spam-bots' traveling around the internet looking for contact forms into which they automatically enter their unsolicited message. The only way to beat these spam-bots is to use web programming techniques to trick the spam-bot into telling you they are a spam-bot and then blocking their enquiry, or by forcing genuine enquiries to enter a displayed code that only a human can read.

Inevitably your email addresses may already be in spammers databases and your will still receive some spam. So the next plan of attack is to deal with the spam emails as they come in. Some of the best methods of doing this are low-cost or even free. Firstly make sure your email server is setup with a good email system that has anti-spam software included. Talk to your service provider or website hosting company about this. Many good software programs don't cost the earth.

Next, consider using an email client on your computer such as Mozilla which can be downloaded for free. Mozilla and other good email clients have excellent junk mail controls that you can use to 'teach' it what is spam and what isn't. These email clients do a fantastic job of dealing with your spam automatically.

With your server software and/or computer email client also don't forget to add your trusted domains and email addresses to your 'white list' to ensure the emails you want get through. Adding email addresses to your address book can also ensure genuine emails don't end up in the junk mail folder.

For a larger organisation, you can look at enlisting the professional help of a full enterprise-wide, anti-spam system and there are plenty of companies around who can provide a solution.

Lastly, there is always the human solution. The sales managers or senior managers within a business are usually the ones who just don't have time to sift through the rubbish emails to get to the genuine enquiries. So why not give this job to one of your assistants or office staff who are paid considerably less than your senior management? By simply training one of your low-cost staff to sift through the enquries and forward the genuine ones onto the correct person to deal with them, you can save your company a great deal of money, tend to new customer enquiries in a timely manner, and keep your existing customers happy by responding to their emails. Email sorting can take as little as half an hour a day, but has the potential to boost your sales and maintain your existing customer base.

Now that you have got to the genuine enquiries, make sure you follow the 'email etiquette' rules. The number one rule is to always respond to an email immediately even if to say you have received the enquiry and will get back to them with a response shortly. There is nothing worse that putting in an enquiry seeking some important information and not even knowing if someone is looking at it.

So employ some of these simple tips to start utilising your websites and online enquiry forms effectively. The effort will be worth while when your sales increase and your existing customers will be happier knowing their enquiries are being read and dealt with.

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