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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?
There's nothing inherently contradictory at all about what you describe, because you are calling it a queue when it is really a pipeline, and process pipeline's length is not directly related to its capacity. For example, you could have a process pipeline that contains certain things that just inherently require time, such as review by multiple people who process daily batches.
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