In the early 90’s I was a professional yachting instructor and I worked for a charter company on Granville Island.

At the main sales desk, all the phones had big red Letraset dollar signs on the hand set, a reminder that every call was a potential sale.

It’s pretty simple. You can’t answer a potential customer’s questions if you don’t answer the phone.

Today, potential customers are more likely to send and email. It’s simple, it’s fast, and you can send the same inquiry to a number of different companies.

Incredibly, it seems that many companies are actually worse at getting back to those customers today than they were a few years ago.

An American consulting firm, Hornstein Associates does an annual survey of e-mail responsiveness. It shows a steady decline in customer response rates since 2002…

Hornstein’s research (and common sense) says that almost everyone sends an e-mail to a company at some point and that all of us expect a response within 24 hours. In 2007 only 33% of companies responded within 24 hours, down almost half from a high of 63% in 2002.

Remarkably, only 51% of the companies responded in any time period — down from 86% in 2002.

full story at MarketWatch.com