Early this year I spent 20+ hours testing how long it would took 52 SaaS companies to reply to my emails. Why? Because everyone hates waiting. We all know the agony of calling a call center and getting stuck on hold. And since I’m always looking for ways to test software for Site Builder Report, I thought support reply time would be a useful metric. The test was simple: I emailed each company twice and tracked how long it took them to reply (ignoring auto-responders). Then I found the average. I only emailed companies on a Monday or Tuesday morning during normal working hours (I don’t think it’s fair to expect customer support at midnight). Here’s what I found: Note: My work is supported by affiliate commissions. Read more »

12% of companies took longer than a day to reply When support reply time is bad, it’s really bad. Some companies (such as 1&1 and WebsiteBuilder.com) took almost 2 days to reply!

21% of companies replied in less than an hour A pretty good reply time.

10% of companies replied in less than 10 minutes At less than 10 minutes, these companies— Jumpseller, Core Commerce, Lemonstand, Resurva and Formsite— had a great reply time.

Big companies were especially slow to reply Companies with 50+ employees were almost 3 times slower than companies with less than 50 employees. Company Size Average Response Time 1-50 4 hrs 12 mins 50+ 12 hrs 2 mins

Website builders were the slowest industry Average reply time varied based on the industry— with website builders trailing heavily: Industry Average Response Time Form Builders 4 hrs 21 mins Email Marketing Software 4hr 25mins Store Builders 6hr 26mins Scheduling Software 8hr 25min Website Builders 13hr 22min

Conclusion I would be careful about drawing too many conclusions from this for a couple reasons: Email is not the only way SaaS companies give support today. There’s also live chat, phone and Twitter. Plus email reply time says nothing about the quality of support (which is why companies will privately measure customer satisfaction). I was also not a paying customer to any of these companies. Some companies may triage non-paying support requests into a low-priority queue. Finally I would be hesitant about making conclusions about individual companies here— I think you’d need a wider sample than 2 support requests to have an accurate sense of their reply time. But with all that being said, I still think the data is interesting and worth sharing. Reply time really is a handy metric that correlates to customer satisfaction. Staring at an empty inbox waiting for an issue to be resolved is simply not fun— especially when support requests go unanswered for days. Data Table Name Test #1 Test #2 Avg Response Time Formsite 3 2 2.5 Resurva 3 2 2.5 Core Commerce 8 3 5.5 Jumpseller 3 12 7.5 Lemonstand 3 12 7.5 Angelfire 26 11 18.5 Active Campaign 27 15 21 Appointlet 4 39 21.5 Form Assembly 12 35 23.5 123 Contact Form 51 20 35.5 Acuity Scheduling 10 87 48.5 Jotform 87 36 61.5 Big Cartel 70 56 63 Yola 25 106 65.5 Ninja Forms 98 58 78 Wufoo 99 62 80.5 Webstarts 92 72 82 Strikingly 153 101 127 Sitezulu 288 3 145.5 Vertical Response 7 289 148 Squarespace 157 161 159 Aweber 131 200 165.5 Formstack 213 213 213 Setmore 493 7 250 Webs 394 142 268 CityMax 358 225 291.5 Square Appointments 409 230 319.5 Shopify 200 509 354.5 Zoho Sites 79 729 404 Formdesk 987 6 496.5 Reservio 891 110 500.5 Voog 54 952 503 3dcart 480 528 504 Doodlekit 788 221 504.5 Webnode 67 977 522 Onepager 703 380 541.5 IM Creator 300 838 569 Wix 1099 101 600 Appointy 12 1209 610.5 Spark Pay 66 1312 689 Get Response 4 1445 724.5 Bigcommerce 1112 372 742 Weebly 205 1500 852.5 Supadupa 1048 1165 1106.5 Moonfruit 708 1901 1304.5 Typeform 2619 114 1366.5 Jimdo 1553 1671 1612 iContact 202 3086 1644 Mailchimp 871 3284 2077.5 MindBody 2678 1900 2289 1&1 931 4338 2634.5 WebsiteBuilder.com 4267 5424 4845.5