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Helping customers with their problems is vital. Customers who have their issues resolved by a business will do business with a company again

70 percent of the time, according to research by Digital Third Coast Internet Marketing and West Interactive (News - Alert).

Yet, 51 percent of consumers report that they have received no reply from a customer service email at some point.

When they do get a response, it often is late or does not adequately answer the concerns of the customer.

Part of this is customer expectations; roughly 41 percent of customers expect a response to email within six hours, according to research. Thankfully, most will accept a response within 24 hours. (The norm among businesses is 17 hours, by the way.)

Whether this expectation of responsiveness is reasonable or not, businesses need to take it seriously.

They also need to get better at their automated emails; Digital Third Coast Internet Marketing and West Interactive report that one out of every four customer service emails gives a misleading answer.

This may sound a little self-serving since I’m a professional copywriter, but the cure for this problem of misleading answers is better writing. Businesses need to hire a professional copyeditor to review automated email responses, and they potentially need to build a larger tree of possible questions, too.

The first step, though, is just answering every email and doing it efficiently.

“It's not hard to see that email is a huge part of your customer service experience, the first step is to make sure none of your customer emails are falling through the cracks,” noted a recent TeamSupport blog post. “After that, speed of response, and accuracy are key - using a strong customer service system will help you manage customer emails and monitor response times.”

Amen.