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What's the deal with 3-4 day email customer service response times?
Had a warranty issue and emailed the brand, which replied with an auto responder that I should expect a reply in 3-4 days.
For the sake of this question, let's assume for this question that the autoresponder is telling the truth, and that it's been at this wait period for months now.
Email accumulates and does so asynchronously, so a 3-4 day backlog doesn't disappear if you don't get to it quickly. Hypothetically, if the entire team got together and crunched through the queue, then theoretically they could shave the response time to 0-1 days in perpetuity. Similarly, if the team all took a vacation for a week, then the queue would become 10-11 days in perpetuity.
Unless I'm missing something, it seems like there is no good business reason for an email queue to be 3-4 days steady state. It would either stretch to infinity due to understaffing, cut down to zero if there is excessive staffing, or be managed into a 0-1 day queue with a one time crunch push if staffing is accurate. In what universe could a capably managed team have to deal with a 3-4 day email response time on an ongoing basis?
It's the SLA (Service Level Agreement) that the customer service company set up with the brand.
I don't know what company you're emailing, whether it is large or small, but it is likely they outsource some of their support to a multi-client service desk that can handle tier 0 or tier 1 requests. The company is paying for a 3-4 day SLA, and if the service desk goes over that length of time there are penalties. Because the multi-client service desk has a multitude of clients, each with a different cadence for emails, the service desk will prioritize emails according to SLA, ensuring all emails are answered with the least financial penalty to the service desk.
I don't have any experience with 3-4 day SLAs (that seems excessive to me) but I have seen emails sit in a queue all day, getting answered by the night guys at 10 PM, because the SLA was 24 hours and other companies had <2 hour SLAs.
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