Email remains a strong customer service channel despite its age.

The convenience is perfect for non-urgent issues. You quickly type out your message, send it, and then go on with your day until you get a response.

Email is good for companies, too. Employees can serve far more customers per hour than on live channels such as phone or chat, while also avoiding the potential for public scrutiny that comes with social media.

Unfortunately, many companies still struggle to get email right.

According to a new report from Netomi, a company that provides an artificial intelligence platform for customer service, 70 percent of publicly traded consumer products and retail companies failed to respond to email. Those that did respond often did poorly.

This post shares some highlights from the report along with some surefire strategies for improving this important channel.

About the email response study

Researchers identified 973 publicly traded companies on the NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange. An attempt was made to either find a customer service email address, or a web form that allowed customers to send the company email-like messages. (Most customer service web forms turn the resulting conversation into an email exchange.)

Companies that did support email were sent a short message asking for information about the company's return policy.

You can read the full report here, or keep scrolling to see some highlights.

Results of the email response study

On the whole, companies faired poorly.

Some companies made it difficult to find their email address or a web form to contact customer service, while 17 percent did not support email at all. Costco stands out by explaining that this is a conscious decision.

Of the companies that did offer customers a way to contact them via email, 70 percent failed to respond. This mirrors the results of a similar study conducted by SuperOffice that found 62 percent of companies ignored their emails.

Companies that did respond often failed to meet even basic expectations. The average response time was 36 hours, even though my own study of over 3,200 consumers shows companies should respond to emails within one hour.

Too many responses were impersonal.

• 28.4 percent failed to use the customer's name.

• 27.6 percent failed to include the name of the employee responding.

The study also found customers were eight times more likely to get a response when emailing a company on a weekday. This is a huge miss for companies, since many customers handle service issues on nights and weekends when they have more personal time.

How to improve email responsiveness

Companies that offer email as a support channel should do it well or risk alienating their customers. Otherwise, take a cue from Costco and opt out completely.

One reason Costco enjoys a stellar reputation for outstanding service is it plays to its strengths. It doesn't risk disappointing customers by offering something, like email support, that it isn't prepared to do exceptionally.

If you do offer email support, there are a few quick fixes that will immediately improve your responsiveness and the quality of your service.

Audit for dead zones. Check your website, product packaging, instruction manuals, and other sources to make a list of all the places where a customer service email address or web form is advertised. Make sure all of these sources point to an actively monitored inbox. A surprising number of customer service emails never get answered because nobody ever sees them!

Monitor response time. In most cases, companies should aim to respond to customer emails within one hour. Meeting this standard requires you to actually monitor your response time. Take note of general trends, along with individual employees who are too slow to respond. Investigate potential problems to identify and address root causes.

Respond thoroughly. Support agents often unwittingly compound their company's email problems by going too fast. This causes them to misunderstand customer issues and respond with incomplete information. The inevitable result is the customer has to email again, which adds to the contact volume and makes it harder to respond quickly. A counterintuitive solution is to take a few extra seconds to fully understand the customer's needs, and compose a thorough response eliminates the need for additional emails.

You can get more ideas an information about responding faster and better to customer emails from this webinar.