Jupiter found that 55 per cent of customers expected accurate responses to email within six hours. Yet only 20 per cent of companies were meeting that expectation. Users continued to expect faster and faster replies to email, so that most users may soon expect one-hour turnaround. Budgets for email customer response were likely to tighten, not expand. If you can't see conflicting agendas here, you're not paying attention.
Customers expect more and better service, and many site operators behave as if they can deliver it.
But now that the easy money of the dot-com boom has evaporated, many Web site operators also want tighter cost control. And hiring people to write coherent and intelligent answers to feedback email costs real money. As Jupiter and others point out, some of the solution lies with better Web sites. You can cut email volumes simply by ensuring a Web site contains easily-found information to answer the bulk of customer queries. And by classifying and examining the email which still arrives, you can write the recipe for making the site better still.