Over the last week I have seen a few “Did not reply within timely manner” threads and I have to ask, what is the return reply expectation to business questions?
What is the expected office hours for phone calls and email?
Are time zones applied to your answer?
If you are located in Australia and call a company in Canada with the expectation of your own time zone and hours of operations,is this to fault the Canadian based company when they don’t reply within your timezone?
If you call on a Saturday while your own business office is open, is your expectation for the called party to also remain open on the weekend?
If you call on Friday, after 5pm… Do you post on forums that the company isn’t calling you back when, by Sunday, you hear nothing?
What I’m getting at is reasonable business expectations and the “instant” access mindset of internet users. Do you apply real world business into your daily interactions or is this over-looked?
Interesting thoughts, and for myself, if there is a problem, I suppose I do expect it instantly, irrespective of the time zone, country, etc. As unrealistic as that is, but after a few moments of panic, calm returns and I realize not much is going to happen until normal business (i.e. brick and mortar) hours arrive.
So a problem occurs, like a missed email update, I wait till the Monday, unless of course I see them on the boards, and then, if I had sent an email friday, with no reply, try a PM, and then no reply, makes no difference to me then. I yell, even if it is a sunday.
It all depends - and time-zones are a pain in the ass!
For serious stuff like hosting issues then I expect 24 hour 365 day support. But for general business stuff then I personally ignore emails over a weekend - except of course from my paying customers who get a reply within 1 - 12 hours.
Living in Australia I am used to working at night if I need to talk to my server support in the US or Verotel in Europe.
Even in my day job I support an application where the technical guys sit in Germany. So I’m often on late night con calls.
Some members do get annoyed if they don’t get a reply to their email in a few hours. But most people do understand that we are in a different timezone and appreciate my responsiveness.
I’m based in Australia and the time zone can be a real pain!
My porn business does nicely and i work seven days a week on it starting at 4am and finishing by 7:30am. See 65% of my income comes from United States. That involves all promos of my blogs, sponsor updates, emails and so on…
The rest of my time is spent on other non porn projects and i retire for the day at 3pm and do other things to make me feel good! I do take holiday breaks when i shut down. Usually when i have had fantastic sale periods…
I usually keep timezones in mind and depending on the issue, I think 48 hours is a reasonable amount of time to get at least a message back that they are looking into your issue so that I am not thinking the message got lost. Too many support staff simply read a message and they will get to it when they get to it, if they only had the common courtesy to at least let the sender know the message was received and maybe a liberal timeline as to when to expect an answer, I would be soooo happy. It has been my experience that support department in the adult industry are grossly understaffed which negatively impacts service. If I get excellent support from a sponsor, I will make more effort to push their products, helping them and me make more money, if I have to constantly remind support staff there are open issues, or just simply don’t get an answer until I call long distance or international to get some action, I either drop them completely or move them way down the list of favorite sponsors.
One thing that always amazes me is that in this industry support staff (for webmasters) is rarely available on weekends, which are probably the most productive days of the week in our industry. So if something breaks on the sponsors side, you don;t get helped until sometime Monday, if you’re lucky.