The latest study by Juxt Consult, a leading Interactive research and advisory agency, graded a majority of India’s top companies as being non-responsive to customers on the Internet.

The scope of the study incorporated 50 of the largest Indian B2C companies in terms of revenue across retail, financial services, telecom and manufacturing sectors. Analysts made email enquiry acting as customers to the companies’ websites and measured their responsiveness in terms of response time and quality of response.

Key Findings included:

58 per cent of the companies did not respond in any manner at all
14 per cent of email address/forms either bounced or displayed errors on submitting a query.
32 per cent of the companies in the overall sample responded satisfactorily.
Amongst different verticals, telecom industry was the most sensitive to customer queries.
Debunking popular myth, PSUs were better than the private companies when it came to customer responsiveness.

The report highlights, to tackle the inability of handling inbound queries (even with high purchase intent) companies need to accommodate new channels of communication like the web and increasing customer expectations.

This study, spread over a period of three weeks, found that most of these companies had no proper mechanism to handle queries from either existing or potential customers. While significant money was being spent on creating an Internet presence, the results of the study did not indicate a similar interest in the maintenance of the basic web properties.

To deliver quality user experiences, companies must create guided service strategies enabling them to understand the complexity of customer interactions and the variety of information required to improve the service.