According to various online surveys, most ecommerce sites respond to email in a matter of hours, maybe a day or two tops. With an average (I estimate) of about a week, our response time is slower than that.
I think it is understandable that this would be dissapointing. Therefore, I have tried not to dismiss the concerns of dclawyer (lawyers already don't feel well loved by the general public).
There may be aspects to our business (high end product, etc) that make our email to product volume ratio different than say other businesses this size, I don't know. I have made changes to our system to make it more efficient and we do have several people who check the email throughout the day, there is a lot of messages and sometimes it takes awhile to respond. And sometimes emails get lost (we get a lot of spam and as a result have fairly aggressive filters).
Btw, dclawyer did email me tonight. Now that I have his email address, I searched the inbox for that address and found no incoming email. It appears we did send out an email to him but that appears to be it for email between us. I could be missing something, but I am only seeing the one email and that was the one we sent. Ideally, we would have sent that email sooner of course.
According to our website, when a person has a problem with our product or otherwise needs service, we encourage them to contact us (we provide an email address and a phone number). During the initial email or phone call, we like to have an oppratunity to possibly fix the situation without requiring an additional shipping cost. If necessary, we ask the person to ship us the product. We include our address and instructions with that request. We don't require an RMA like many other resellers, but we do like to hear from people before getting a package mysteriously in the mail. Once we get the package, I have instructed the staff to contact the customer letting them know we have it. Truthfully, they don't always do that and I bug them about it from time to time. After the corrective action (repair, refund), I then want them to email the customer again with a status. It is ok for them to combine those 2 emails into one if the corrective action occurs fairly quickly. Usually, that is the last email we send to the customer unless they have other questions. From my audits, most service requests are handled like this. Occasionally a package gets lost in shipping, emails get blocked or the customer doesn't give us any way to contact them (it happens suprisingly often), etc but most cases are handled to the customer's satisfaction (according to what most customers tell us).
peter
