Since 2011, my friend and colleague Jeff Toister, of Toister Performance Solutions, has conducted an annual survey on email response time, asking these straightforward questions:

• How fast do you expect a response to an email you send to a business?
• How quickly should you respond to an email from a business? A coworker? A friend?

This year’s survey revealed that email response time expectations continue to escalate: 16.5% of respondents want a business to reply within an hour, 13% will wait four hours, and 43.4% want a response within one day. Any way you slice the data, one thing is clear: Businesses better hurry up and answer, or customers will walk away. Or even worse — they will email again!

Knowing that I have many an opinion on how to do email right, Jeff kindly interviewed me on ways customer care organizations, and businesses of all types, can improve email response time without sacrificing email quality.

Please watch our interview and let me know what you think. Do the survey results match your customers’ expectations for email response time? How soon do you expect an email response from a business, coworker, or friend?