i-Pry mystery shoppers make customer service inquiries using the online chat facilities at websites. The average length of time taken for customer service staff to respond is charted above.

Note that over 55% of people have to wait for over one minute to receive a response, and in over 20% of cases there is no response at all after five minutes.

i-Pry research reveals that over 75% of customers expect a response within 2 minutes, and over 90% are not prepared to wait longer than 3 minutes.