Got a Complaint? Don’t send it by email.

People who complain to companies via e-mail are waiting longer to get a response: a study found only a third of top firms replied within 24 hours in 2007, compared with nearly two-thirds in 2002.

‘”I think we’ve got plenty of infrastructure, we’ve got more technology than we know what to do with. The problem is there isn’t a strategy in place that says it’s important to treat the customer well.’

Nearly half — 49 per cent — did not reply at all in 2007, down from a high of 86 per cent five years earlier, according to the customer service study by Hornstein Associates. “We keep recreating the wheel, bringing new customers in to take the place of those who’ve had bad experiences and leave,” Hornstein told CBC News Online.

Clients need to implement a strategy that addresses customer feedback – good or bad. I always believed that the customer should:

A. get email acknowledgment of the feedback sent
B. a solution or comment within 48 hours when dealing with online feedback

Why companies don’t see the value in this is beyond my scope.

More on the story at CBC.

Will Wii Change the Way We Surf?

According to a recent Merrill-Lynch study, by 2011, 30% of American households will own a Wii. If that estimate holds up (and given the Wii’s still-thundering sales figures, there’s no reason to doubt it), about one out of every three U.S. homes will soon have a new kind of Web browser sitting in their living room.

The obvious immediate objection, or course, is “who’s going to browse the Web without a keyboard?”

The most obvious immediate answer: the very young, who already send text messages over their cellphones more than they send IMs over their computers. They’ll acclimate quickly to the keyboard-free Web, and being so popular, developers will figure out ways to integrate the Wii’s pointer/nunchuck controller to Web apps which make the experience increasingly intuitive. (Of course, Nintendo could always go the Xbox route, too, and add a keyboard peripheral for us old school Netizens.)

Couple the Wii’s Internet Channel with the company’s stylus-operated DS handheld getting an Opera browser in June, and it’s easy to see Nintendo becoming the dominant Internet hardware company a few years down the road. Couple that to the growing sophistication and popularity of Web-integrated cellphones, and it’s difficult to see the PC remaining our main means for accessing the Internet for much longer.

So here’s the million dollar question: If the personal computer is no longer essential to the Internet, what happens to all the industries built around it?