Strike Force Sales, an Australian company that undertakes professional prospectings of the market, conducted a survey to see how promptly companies replied to customers' emails. The author of the study, Chris Moriarty, Managing Director of the company, is still waiting for an answer to an email sent more than 8 months ago to the largest concrete provider in Australia, which should probably have at least one person in charge of replying to the emails of potential clients. As he admits, he assumed that he would most likely get few replies from the companies that displayed a generic address on their website, but the extent of the lack of interest was greater than what he had anticipated.

In order to carry out the survey, Moriarty sent information requests to 460 major Australian companies, all of them having 100 or more employees. The results were disappointing. Over a 7-day time range, the Strike Force Sales director received answers from only 41% of the companies he had previously tried to get hold of. This means that 59% of a representative part of the Australian business sector is not very attentive to sales offers received by email.

Although some companies seemed to be receptive to modern means of communication, it still took them one day and 8 hours, on average, to reply to the email. Of the 41% that showed some interest in the query of the sales company, only 15% actually picked up the phone to make a call as well.

Some of the companies that Moriarty emailed had an automatic email whose function was to announce customers that they would be contacted in the next couple of days. The survey indicates that this method is mostly used to keep at bay annoying or insistent approaches - insomuch as only 51% of the companies who resort to it later returned with a follow-up email or phone call.

For technology skeptics, who are of the opinion that you cannot truly have a conversation intermediated by computers, Chris Moriarty revealed that only 0.9% of the messages he sent were tagged as undeliverable, so the poor results of the survey did not derive from that.

It seems that companies have to learn that, given the competitive business world we're living in, they risk losing their clients in an instant if they don't rise up to the occasion and meet their customers' expectations.