Menu
Blog

Our work is supported by affiliate commissions. Learn More

Average Customer Support Response Times For SaaS Companies

I emailed 52 SaaS companies to test support time. Here's what I found.

Our work is supported by affiliate commissions. Learn More

Average Customer Support Response Times For SaaS Companies

By Steve Benjamins | Updated May 5 2021

Early this year I spent 20+ hours testing how long it would took 52 SaaS companies to reply to my emails.

Why? Because everyone hates waiting. We all know the agony of calling a call center and getting stuck on hold. And since I’m always looking for ways to test software for Site Builder Report, I thought support reply time would be a useful metric.

The test was simple: I emailed each company twice and tracked how long it took them to reply (ignoring auto-responders). Then I found the average. I only emailed companies on a Monday or Tuesday morning during normal working hours (I don’t think it’s fair to expect customer support at midnight).

Here’s what I found:

Toggle Section

12% of companies took longer than a day to reply

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)

Average Reply Time (Hours)

Toggle Section

21% of companies replied in less than an hour

A pretty good reply time.

Toggle Section

10% of companies replied in less than 10 minutes

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

Average Reply Time (Minutes)

Average Reply Time (Minutes)

Toggle Section

Big companies were especially slow to reply

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

Company Size Average Response Time
1-50 4 hrs 12 mins
50+ 12 hrs 2 mins

Toggle Section

Website builders were the slowest industry

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

Industry Average Response Time
Form Builders 4 hrs 21 mins
Email Marketing Software 4hr 25mins
Store Builders 6hr 26mins
Scheduling Software 8hr 25min
Website Builders 13hr 22min

Toggle Section

Conclusion

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

       
Name Test #1 Test #2 Avg Response Time
Formsite 3 2 2.5
Resurva 3 2 2.5
Core Commerce 8 3 5.5
Jumpseller 3 12 7.5
Lemonstand 3 12 7.5
Angelfire 26 11 18.5
Active Campaign 27 15 21
Appointlet 4 39 21.5
Form Assembly 12 35 23.5
123 Contact Form 51 20 35.5
Acuity Scheduling 10 87 48.5
Jotform 87 36 61.5
Big Cartel 70 56 63
Yola 25 106 65.5
Ninja Forms 98 58 78
Wufoo 99 62 80.5
Webstarts 92 72 82
Strikingly 153 101 127
Sitezulu 288 3 145.5
Vertical Response 7 289 148
Squarespace 157 161 159
Aweber 131 200 165.5
Formstack 213 213 213
Setmore 493 7 250
Webs 394 142 268
CityMax 358 225 291.5
Square Appointments 409 230 319.5
Shopify 200 509 354.5
Zoho Sites 79 729 404
Formdesk 987 6 496.5
Reservio 891 110 500.5
Voog 54 952 503
3dcart 480 528 504
Doodlekit 788 221 504.5
Webnode 67 977 522
Onepager 703 380 541.5
IM Creator 300 838 569
Wix 1099 101 600
Appointy 12 1209 610.5
Spark Pay 66 1312 689
Get Response 4 1445 724.5
Bigcommerce 1112 372 742
Weebly 205 1500 852.5
Supadupa 1048 1165 1106.5
Moonfruit 708 1901 1304.5
Typeform 2619 114 1366.5
Jimdo 1553 1671 1612
iContact 202 3086 1644
Mailchimp 871 3284 2077.5
MindBody 2678 1900 2289
1&1 931 4338 2634.5
WebsiteBuilder.com 4267 5424 4845.5