Average Customer Support Response Times For SaaS Companies

When support reply time is bad, it’s really bad. Some companies (such as 1&1 and WebsiteBuilder.com) took almost 2 days to reply!

Average Reply Time (Hours)

A pretty good reply time.

At less than 10 minutes, these companies— Jumpseller, Core Commerce, Lemonstand, Resurva and Formsite— had a great reply time.

Average Reply Time (Minutes)

Companies with 50+ employees were almost 3 times slower than companies with less than 50 employees.

Average reply time varied based on the industry— with website builders trailing heavily:

I would be careful about drawing too many conclusions from this for a couple reasons:

Email is not the only way SaaS companies give support today. There’s also live chat, phone and Twitter. Plus email reply time says nothing about the quality of support (which is why companies will privately measure customer satisfaction).

I was also not a paying customer to any of these companies. Some companies may triage non-paying support requests into a low-priority queue.

Finally I would be hesitant about making conclusions about individual companies here— I think you’d need a wider sample than 2 support requests to have an accurate sense of their reply time.

But with all that being said, I still think the data is interesting and worth sharing. Reply time really is a handy metric that correlates to customer satisfaction. Staring at an empty inbox waiting for an issue to be resolved is simply not fun— especially when support requests go unanswered for days.

Data Table