For any given SaaS company, the fastest response is probably not the optimal result. At least 3 other variables are equally important:<p>1. Quality. How thorough is the response? As the blog post says, "Plus email reply time says nothing about the quality of support."<p>2. Cost. Are customers willing to pay more for speed and/or quality (either in dollars or because the company spends less elsewhere)? Up to what point?<p>Those 2 are the obvious trades (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle#.22Pick_any_two.22" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle#.2...</a>). There's at least 1 more:<p>3. Point of diminishing returns. Assuming a customer is willing to pay more, what's the real impact of a longer delay or lower quality? How {fast,good} do they actually benefit from?<p>Faster is only better when the test is only measuring speed. If you're reading this post and thinking "Man, our team should respond faster!" -- maybe they should, but maybe those other factors mean they shouldn't.<p>To give three examples I've seen in support teams:<p>- Company A has a big team of inexperienced staff sending fast responses. They succeed on speed (and would show up at the top of this list), but probably fail on quality. As a user, this is form letter hell.<p>- Company B has a big team of very skilled staff sending fast responses, or has developers or whole engineering team task-switch when a question comes in. They succeed on speed and quality but, depending on the product, probably fail on cost. May also have lower quality, since customer support/service is a skill that not everyone does well. As a user, this feels great. Sometimes the person who coded the feature I'm asking about is replying to me. OTOH, if I don't actually need knowledge that's unique to them, their time may be more valuable working on that feature :-)<p>- Company C succeeds on all of these, with a right-sized group providing high-quality answers quickly (let's say 2 hours, not instantly). Alas, customers aren't willing to pay for that. Their customers perceive diminishing returns from answers in less than 24 hours, and/or the price premium they want to pay for a faster (or maybe more thorough, or more clearly written..) answer is very low.<p>Sounds obvious, but based on how often companies make one of these mistakes, it's not. When one aspect is relatively easy to measure and others are hard or impossible, they tend to lose.