In this study carried out in June 2019, we analyze the response time of the Customer Service Department of more than 50 crowdlending and crowdfunding platforms.
Context and Goal of the Study
As investors in crowdlending and crowdfunding platforms, which are often based on a purely online investment experience, we consider essential a fast and efficient Customer Service, capable of clarifying any questions and responding quickly and effeciently to the needs we might have while using the website or seeking more information..
One of the most recurrent complaints we have on TodoCrowdlending about some of the platforms is the time it takes to answer the emails and messages… so with this in mind, we designed an experiment to evaluate the response times of the different platforms that we have covered in this web page.
Experiment Setup
For this study we asked one of our contributors to send an email – in English or Spanish, depending on each case – to each of the platforms we have reviewed at TodoCrowdlending.com with more or less similar content, asking a couple of specific questions and requesting information.
To calculate the response time, the difference in minutes between the sending of the email and the receipt of a satisfactory, ‘human’ response from the platform has been taken into account – the emails sent automatically (i.e. “we have received your request, we will attend it as soon as possible”) have NOT been taken into account for this purpose-.
The quality of the answers has been more or less equivalent in all cases, that is why it has not been taken into account this in the evaluation, as it is also a more subjective parameter.
Clarifications
We must bear in mind that although the results of this study may be interesting, it is only a a specific / limited test… NOT of a complete evaluation of the quality of the Customer Service or even of their response times (for this, it would be necessary to send several emails of different types in different circumstances and time frames, which is beyond the scope of this analysis).
It is possible that some of the platforms that have taken longer than the average to respond the email, genuinely received the message with delay, were closed or with limited service that day, or had some kind of circumstance not representative of the standard of their activity … Therefore, no definitive conclusions should be drawn definitive based solely on this study.
Results
The table at the beginning of this post shows the response time in minutes of each of the platforms and their classification into 6 categories: from companies that have taken less than an hour to answer (blue color) to those that have taken more than 4 days (red color).
Finally, we would like to highlight above the rest these 11 companies that met our request satisfactorily in less than an hour … Congratulations!
