E-mail your query, say businesses -- but few reply

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Waiting for a company to reply to your online query? You could be waiting a long time, with an Australian survey finding nearly 60 percent of large companies don't respond to customer's enquiries.

Sales consultancy Strike Force Sales sent 460 information requests, by e-mail or post, to a range of Australian organizations that have at least 100 staff to simulate genuine customer enquiries.

But after more than a week, 59 percent of these companies had yet to respond, said Darren Cox, the firm's operations manager, and those that did reply took at least one-and-a-half days.

The least responsive businesses were in retail and construction, the survey showed.

"They (companies) want to say you can contact us but that doesn't mean that we will contact you," Cox told Reuters.

"The companies are not only losing money in sales but they are also losing brand recognition when the e-mails are sent to a weird e-mail space no one really looks at."

According to the survey, only 50 percent of the companies that send an automated e-mail response to online customer queries follow it up with a genuine e-mail.

And less than seven percent of businesses actually call a customer who has expressed interest in their product online, and they take nearly three days to do so.

"Considering the Internet has revolutionized most businesses and the amount that is spent on advertising and generating sales, it is sheer negligence for companies to ignore e-mail enquiries," Cox said.

"They get a lot of spam -- 80 percent spam, 20 percent genuine queries -- and no one sits and goes through everything."

(Reporting by Tanaya Das, editing by Miral Fahmy)