The statistics don’t lie — most organizations are abysmal at responding to email inquiries. In both support and sales situations, companies are doing a terrible job keeping up with the volume. In fact, it’s volume that may be causing the problem:

In 2010, over 294 billion email messages were sent every day. That’s 2.8 million messages per second.

A recent study conducted by Internet Retailer Magazine revealed that 73% of web merchants receive at least 50 support emails every day. Nearly a quarter of companies reported receiving more than 200 inquiries daily.