Vendors - how long do you take to reply to customers?...

[Evangeline Arcadia]

This is a general question to vendors out there - how long do you think a vendor should take to reply to purchase issues from customers . I have an issue right now and contacted a vendor some days ago (both by IM and notecard) and haven't heard a thing. In my view if I was a vendor I would want to get back to a customer quickly (and some vendors I've dealt with have done that and provided very good service). I personally just don't understand if they don't as it can affect customer loyalty and future sales. But do you think that's just impatience? What would your reasons be for not doing so?

[Alwin Alcott]

could be several reasons..

holidays

ill

left sl

have a real life somewhere too...

and mistakes made by customers themself.. after 1000 times "why i wear a box instead of clothes" i can imagine some aren't in a hurry to respond ...

and this way there are more reasons to find i think.

But how long is reasonable... i would take about a week and resend a IM or notecard, wait another week.... after that... give up...

[Sassy Romano]

Send an IM during the hours I'm awake and the response will in most cases be within minutes.

Otherwise, it will be within a few hours.

 

Send a notecard during my awake hours and you'll need to wait until I next login and that could take days.

[Amethyst Jetaime]

Vendors are RL people too and may not log in everyday.  There are many RL reasons for this.  Alwin gave some examples.  I'll add that particularly this time of year they could be on vacation.

[JoeKingleigh]

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Evangeline Arcadia wrote:

This is a general question to vendors out there - how long do you think a vendor should take to reply to purchase issues from customers . I have an issue right now and contacted a vendor some days ago (both by IM and notecard) and haven't heard a thing. In my view if I was a vendor I would want to get back to a customer quickly (and some vendors I've dealt with have done that and provided very good service). I personally just don't understand if they don't as it can affect customer loyalty and future sales. But do you think that's just impatience? What would your reasons be for not doing so?

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Why are you asking this here?

Joe

/Don't you know of the existence of a Commerce/Merchants forum?

[Stormm Firecaster]

I have my Gmail set up to send a pop up every time I get an email, so every email I recieve that says Service on it gets opened the moment I see it and I check my email several times a day on days when RL are busy.  Often times I have caught double purchases before the customer even notices and log in to refund them and I am able to log in imddeiately when I see anything related to be given to my avatar from someone I don't know so customers often have replies within minutes.

However, not everyone can do that.  Some work long hours, have large families, appointments,etc.  I ask for 24 to 48 to get back to someone, just in case.  I think that is a decent amount of time to give.  Even with all the busy RL things going on, if someone is going to be a creator in SL and sell things, they need to treat it the same as they would if they were running a shop in RL.

Some may not find a few cents here or a dollar there as a lot of money, but to some, they save and scrap to get enough to be able to put into SL and the creator that recieves that L$ for a purchase, should go out of their way to stand behind their product and take care of the customer, respect the fact that they chose you to buy from, it may have taken that person a long time to save up for those L$ and that item they chose may mean more to them than just a silly trinket.

Just my 2L$ worth of thoughts.

 

P.S.

Keep in mind as well that worst case scenario, some that still have items up, may no longer be with us in SL or RL, so there may never be a response.

[Tari Landar]

How long I take to respond depends heavily on whatever is going on in my life at that moment.I go out of town at least twice a year for about a month, give or take. I also homeschool my children, work from home, and am currently working towards a degree as well. Some weeks my days are just a constant battle for time that I simply don't have. Thankfully, from about May through September, my kids don't have school. Well, nothing formal anyway, they have one month of focused studies, but it's focused entirely on a subject of their own choosing(though that's somewhat irrelevant I suppose).

I always make certain I have what days I will be gone in my profile, or if I am particularly busy on a given week, I'll put that in there too, and I always make certain I have how to contact me written in my profile too. Sometimes, though, customers don't pay much attention to those things. Unfortunately not every single IM sent, actually goes to email, though it seems the majority of them do, I have missed one or two over the years(I consider that a quirk, not the norm). I do my best to contact customers back as soon as possible, but it is plausible that I might need a few days, or even a week. Typically, I contact back within 24-48 hours, depending on the day of the original contact. A week is definitely not unheard of. Me, personally, I have no qualms waiting a week, two weeks, even a month, but I have a very strange amount of patience. Unless of course it was something dire. I've only run into one issue in all my years in sl that was dire and I was really hoping the merchant would contact me back ASAP. It was for a product that had malfunctioned, the day before I absolutely needed it to work properly for a charity event. That has been my only real time sensitive issue, and when the merchant wasn't able to get back to me until about an hour before I needed it completed, she actually refunded me the entire purchase amount, plus gave me something as compensation. Even though she actually fixed it in time, with a couple of minutes to spare(literally), she didn't have to refund me, or offer any compensation, but she did, because she felt bad. It was her opinion that merchants should contact back within 24 hours. I don't necessarily agree that this is a reasonable time frame, though. Reasonably, I think a week or two, depending on the issue, is reasonable.

What I really hate about customers contacting me, is when they choose to do so by leaving a review on MP. People don't realize that a LOT of those reviews, are never sent to email to the merchant(it's been broken since the moment they said they fixed it, a while back, actually). So it could be a while before anyone even notices you left a review in the first place. I didn't use to make it a habit to check reviews, since most people rarely got them. Then I had a customer complain to me weeks after he/she had left a review, because I still hadn't done anything about it. In the review the customer claims to have contacted me, sent NCs(which I auto-accept, so they *never* cap, I don't have to accept them, the system does it for me, and there were none from this person) and IMs. Oddly, when I attempted to get a hold of the customer, I never got a response, at all. So, I had no choice but to follow up his/her review myself, months later after numerous failed attempts. Those kinds of things, are absolutely obnoxious and definitely NOT the best way to contact a merchant. Odds are, some of your reviews aren't going to be seen for days, weeks, maybe even months. 

[Evangeline Arcadia]

Thanks to everyone who replied. It's good to have an understanding of why someone might take time to reply - it might seem obvious but not everyone has the same life, so people might have different reasons. I do think however that vendors, as some already do, should state what kind of time frame to expect a response, or if they are on holiday etc.  - I'm talking about product or purchase issues rather than general enquiries. It helps customers be patient, and not just think that a vendor doesn't care if they haven't responded as quickly as they expect:)