Guess what type of company is worst for online service

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Do IT vendors practice what they preach? Judging by the results of a recent online customer service study in the US, not always. High-tech companies, as a group, ranked lower than airline, travel and telecoms companies when it comes to things like responding to online inquiries, according to the study, conducted by Internet research firm The Customer Respect Group. The Customer Respect Group, backed by business consulting firm International Ventures in Dublin, Ireland, analysed the websites of 500 large US companies for the quality of online interaction. Among the findings: One-third of 24 leading high-tech companies in the study didn't respond to inquiries submitted through their websites. "To me that was one of the big surprises," said Thorsten Ganz, vice president of research at The Customer Respect Group. "This is the high-tech industry, and they are supposed to have all the bells and whistles in place." Service was not the pits at all high-tech company sites, however. Dell Computer, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft and Xerox all scored 9 points or more out of a possible 10. The average for the entire high-tech group was 6.8. Another finding that surprised Ganz was that less than 30 per cent of the companies that did respond to online inquires replied immediately using 'autoresponder' technology. And only slightly over half of the sites studied provided keyword search functions. On the positive side, high-tech websites on the whole scored high on privacy policy disclosure and ease of navigation. None of the 24 high-tech companies ranked in the study are clients of The Customer Respect Group. Alorie Gilbert writes for CNET News.com.