Melbourne-based online benchmarking company Global Reviews found during a recent research exercise that 50 percent of complaints it sent to companies via e-mail were "either not addressed or ignored altogether".
In contrast, Global Reviews director, Adir Shiffman, said that businesses were very efficient when it came to handling sales enquiries over the same contact medium.
Schiffman conceded that the research finding may only have confirmed what many consumers might have expected intuitively, however he said the inconsistency was noteworthy.
And inconsistency persisted not only within companies but also across companies, according to Schiffman.
Globa Reviews examined 20 enterprises well known in the Australian market including Holden, Qantas, NIB and Westpac and rated their e-mail customer service offerings.
Schiffman said that while some companies appeared uninterested in addressing e-mail complaints others, such as car rental service Hertz, went out of their way to answer e-mail queries. Perhaps shaving a little off its postage budget, Hertz replied to the test complaints with signed letters in an electronic format that specifically addressed the customer concern raised.
Also inconsistent was any link between the companies' apparent preparedness to accept complaints on their Web sites and the way their service was rated.
"There was no correlation between the presences of that [service] on their Web site and the quality of responses to complaints," said Shiffman.
In keeping with the theme, Shiffman noted that companies were not treating new and old channels of complaint, such as phone lines, equally. E-mail response times varied from minutes to nearly five days.
Shiffman said companies need to take more time to ensure they're offering consumers consistent level of customer experience across all the contact points they offer.
Overall the group's average score was, according to Global Reviews, relatively low at 48 percent.
The insurance industry put in the best e-mail customer service performance with an average score of 62 percent, narrowly beating banks (55 percent). The next best performer was the utility industry (40 percent) which scored a fraction higher than tourism (39 percent).
Its not just complaints that are ignored.
In the course of my work and on a personal basis I often have to obtain prices and info on various products. I usually start by searching the net for vendors in Australia. It is very common to find a vendor who has a website with a "contact us" facility on the site. It is also very common to not get any response, or a response weeks later, from enquiries made to the vendor by using the "contact us" facility.
I used to make follow up phone calls but now I don't. I figure if a company can't be bothered to respond to an e-mail, they don't want the business. Therefore I take our business somewhere else.
This isn't just smaller companies either.