Seller Responsiveness Metrics

[john]

Responsiveness

Great businesses don’t just provide a great product; they also provide great service. One metric of customer service is response time. On MorphMarket we capture this in the Responsiveness Rating and Average Response Time.

Levels of service varies a lot across our sellers, and so the goal is to set the buyer’s expectations about what to expect with a particular seller. Facebook does a similar thing, with a “usually replies within” message.

Responsiveness Ratings

The Responsiveness Rating is a measure of what percentage of recent inquiries have received some kind of action by the seller. This could be a reply message or even a quick reply action like “Decline Inquiry”. Similarly, the Average Response Time is the average time to that action for recent inquiries.

We’ve displayed the responsiveness metrics for years now, but up until now, only during the inquiry process. For example:

This is what it looks like when a seller has not responded to many inquiries recently:

Now Shown on the Store Page

As of this week, we’re now giving these metrics higher visibility. We think it’s useful to buyers doing research, and we also want sellers to be more aware of it. It’s a great opportunity to shine by trying to maintain an average response time of not much more than a day or so, but the main goal is to warn buyers about sellers who are for whatever reason not responding at all or consistently don’t respond for days.

Here’s what the first seller above’s store page now shows:

Tips for Responsivness

It’s fairly obvious how to maintain good metrics. Just try to address each inquiry that comes in in a timely manner. But since originally introducing these metrics, we’ve done several of things to make it easier for sellers to manage responsiveness:

• In 2018, we added Quick Reply actions. These are templated Seller responses for common scenarios. These allow replies in many situation with just a few clicks.

• In 2017, we added Away Status for extended times when you are unable to respond to messages. These non-responses are not counted against you.

• And this week, we just added a feature to the messages page: Needs Reply.

Needs Reply

On the messages page, sellers will now see inquiries tagged with “Needs Reply” which have not received a response from them. To make these even easier to find, we’ve added a filter button
so you can easily find them and clear them out with quick reply actions.

Additionally, you can go to messages needing reply by following this that is visible only to the seller on the store page.

If your metrics aren’t great right now, don’t panic. Go through and clear out all the inquiries needing reply, and try to begin responding in a more regular fashion. The metrics only track against recently inquiries, so after either more inquiries come in or enough time passes, the stats will clear out. Your prospective customers will thank you for it!

[t_h_wyman]

On the one hand, I like this and on the other, I hate it.

I do like knowing if/that a seller has a good record of replying.

However… The nature of my job means that I am very restricted from the net while I am at work so most days I end up not seeing an inquiry until I get home, many hours after the initial message was sent. Some time ago I set my status as constantly ‘AWAY’ with a note about my limited access so that people would not think I was ignoring them. Now I kind of feel like the prospect of having a ‘Usually responds in 12 hours’ next to my name could hurt me versus someone with a shorter reply time simply because of the the instant gratification mindset.

[john]

@t_h_wyman I get it. We know breeders can’t respond in 2 hours all the time. As mentioned above, we consider a usual response time of less than 1 day to be good, and of course stuff always happens an occasionally they’ll be longer, sometimes shorter. 12 hours is great!

But if someone expects to get a reply every 2 hours – regardless of how silly that may be – then they can choose accordingly. From the market’s point of view, better that they know this rather than disappointed afterward. All other factors being equal (which is not likely because you know how many factors there are), maybe it’s a tie breaker.

In reality, buyers are likely already inquiring to multiple sellers and finalizing the deal more often than not with whoever is responding first. I don’t think this will change much for conscientious sellers like yourself.

[mnatale]

Maybe the seller should put in their bio that they will respond to inquiries after a certain time of day? I am still fairly new to this site, but I don’t expect that sellers basically sit and wait on inquires. I research all breeders and what pops out the most are the positive reviews. So maybe putting their respond times in the bio might help ease some minds.

[royalross]

I quite like this tbh.
However, I did have an enquiry about one of my animals , asking for more photos, could someone point out to me how I can reply to that ( send pics to customers) without having to email them directly.
Many thanks.

[john]

If you reply with your email account instead of on our /messages page, you can attach photos.

[royalross]

Ok… brilliant , thanks John.

[nicholas-mati]

I personally have no issue with the concept of seller responsiveness and even kind of like it, but there are one or two use cases that don’t seem to have been considered. For example, how would you go about indicating that you’ve viewed a message, but no response is needed (e.g. if the person just messages “Thank you!” or “I’ll be ready for pickup at that time.” to you)? An “acknowledge” or “no response needed” button seems appropriate. I suppose the seller can just reply “Acknowledged,” but that seems a bit wordy / unnecessary.