Here is one simple thing that you can do to ensure your web business practices work for your customers: Pay attention to your contact form and reply when someone hits it!

Seriously, this is one of the easiest and most overlooked tactics you can employ. Robert Ouimet suggests, with some creative symbolism, that you think of your email just as you do your phone. You wouldn’t consider not answering a customer calling on the phone would you?

Robert points to the Hornstein E-Mail Survey that shows email customer service is terrible—only 33 percent of brand name companies bothered to respond in 24 hours—and getting worse.

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.

  2001:  46%
  2002:  63%
  2003:  59%
  2004:  37%
  2005:  42%
  2006:  42%
  2007:  33%

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

Now, I take the results with a grain of salt, since the whole survey is in effect a placed ad for Hornstein Associates. But at the same time the results square with my own experience.

So what’s to be done?

We often have clients approach us to do web marketing for them. Excellent, that’s what we do. We love new business. It’s our promise: we make you a web marketing genius.

They often want to do all the right things: search engine advertising, blogger outreach, email newsletters, website redevelopment, copywriting, online public relations. Awesome, those are all highly effective. We love delivering results and those are great ways to do it. But before we get to those things, let’s start with the simple things. Does your contact form work? How do you deal with email customer service?

Here are a few practical rules to implement or to compare against your own practices.

1. Making contact needs to be easy and available. Make sure your contact information or a link to your contact information is on every page of your website.
2. Make sure your contact information is labelled simply ‘Contact’ or ‘Contact Us’. It’s cute to say ‘Knock Us Up’ but it means different things to different folks.
3. Make sure your contact page works. Can people email you? Can people call you? When was the last time you tested it?
4. Set an expectation at the outset. On your contact page can customers see your available hours? Should you have a prospective response time (say, 24 hours)? Should you send an auto-response email to confirm receipt of the inquiry?
5. Offer self-service alternatives—on your contact page, its thank you page if you use a form, and in any auto response you might use. Most people browsing websites are already engaged in an active pursuit of information. Make it easy for them to find what they’re seeking.
6. Start an FAQ and update it with your frequently received email questions and reponses. But only if you’re frequently getting the same email inquiry. An FAQ is a frequently asked questions. It’s not a chance to pitch product benefits, unless it’s the right response to a question you’re getting over and over. (And then maybe it’s time to rethink more than just your contact form. If your benefits aren’t front and centre what is?)

Contact from your customers is an incredibly valuable feedback loop. What are you doing with that feedback?

Perhaps you’d like to tell us.