Rising expectations for rapid responses are draining the life from asynchronous customer support, according to a new study by a global customer support platform for e-commerce brands and online retailers.
The rapid rise in discovery commerce is creating a profitable opportunity for retailers, but also a dilemma: retailers are selling items faster than they can support them, eDesk noted in its study of customer response expectations.
It maintained that, in that fast-paced environment, consumers are looking for much faster response times — almost four times as quick as typical on traditional marketplaces.
That speed gap is most evident at the moment of purchase.
“Because of new, fast-moving channels like TikTok Shop and other live shopping platforms exploding onto the scene, getting a quick, instant answer to a shopper’s question is the absolute key to them actually buying something,” eDesk CEO Gareth Cummings told the E-Commerce Times.
“Ninety percent of consumers say it is essential to receive an immediate response when they inquire about customer service,” he added.
“Many sales are lost because customers ask basic questions about product specifications, and shipping times occur outside normal business hours,” he explained. “By providing instant answers to these questions, a customer service representative eliminates this barrier for all customers interested in buying products at any time, thereby converting all customer service contacts into revenue-producing opportunities.”
Speed Now a Trust Signal
Artificial intelligence is accelerating those expectations, suggested Ashu Dubey, founder and CEO of Alhena AI, a San Francisco company that specializes in AI-powered customer experience solutions for e-commerce. “It’s the Era of ChatGPT,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “It’s no longer acceptable to have a 24-hour turnaround time for responding to customer queries. Customers expect to be answered way faster.”
“Expectations have accelerated dramatically,” declared Scott Gifis, CEO of NoFraud, a fraud prevention technology company in New York City.
“Customers now interact with brands in real time across social chat and messaging platforms, and they expect support to match that speed,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “When purchasing decisions happen in seconds, delays in support feel out of step with the buying experience. Fast responses signal trust, competence, and brand credibility. Slow responses create friction and doubt.”
Lou Haverty, owner of Tank Retailer, a seller of tank and truck equipment products in Media, Pa., agreed that rapid support is a trust builder. “There is no question that consumers expect fast response times from online platforms because with the online e-commerce model, customers can’t see the product or the salesperson, so they require higher levels of trust to feel comfortable making a purchase,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
“Providing a high level of customer service responsiveness, very quickly, is a key factor in providing that trust to consumers when they make a purchase,” he added.
After reviewing thousands of exchanges between customers and sellers, eDesk also found that the average customer expects to hear back from a seller on TikTok Shop within 1.1 hours after making a purchase, while the average response times were 4.2 hours on Amazon and 6.0 hours on eBay.
Platform Norms Reset Support Expectations
Those findings highlight how platform context shapes customer expectations, NoFraud’s Gifis noted. “TikTok is real-time, conversational, and highly social, so customers naturally expect immediate engagement,” he said. “Marketplaces like Amazon and eBay still feel more transactional.”
“The takeaway for retailers is that support service level agreements can’t be one-size-fits-all,” he added. “They need to adapt to the norms and pace of each platform where customers are engaging.”
Andre Inverdale, founder and managing consultant at the Ardinal Strategy Group (ASG), a management consulting firm in Atlanta, explained that on platforms like TikTok, the barrier between “content” and “commerce” has largely dissolved.
“When a brand is witty in the comments or goes viral, it invites a real-time conversation,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “Customers now view a brand’s online presence as a digital ‘open’ sign. If you are active enough to post, you are expected to be active enough to respond. Whether it’s an AI chatbot or a human, the expectation has shifted from business hours to always-on engagement.”
He added that TikTok Shop provides immediate, public-facing metrics: average shipping speed, satisfaction scores, and, most importantly, average response rates.
“On legacy platforms like Amazon or eBay, the interface is transactional and often obscures the seller behind a Contact Seller button that leads to an outdated email-style thread,” he said. “TikTok, however, uses a mobile-first, instant-messaging UI. Because the customer can see that a brand usually responds in under six hours, a 24-hour wait feels like a long time. This transparency forces responsiveness to become a primary competitive advantage for conversion.”
Less Forgiving Consumers
The eDesk researchers also found that customers who do not receive timely responses to their inquiries are less forgiving and more likely to abandon their purchases. Nearly half of customers (47%) will abandon their purchases if they do not receive a response within 30 minutes of asking, and three out of five (60%) will give up on their purchase entirely if they do not hear back from the seller within 60 minutes.
Communication gaps do not affect all buyers equally. For some customers, the cost of silence is higher — and more immediate. Support delays can have an acute impact on sales to women, contended Shampaigne Graves, a women’s consumer expert, trainer, and speaker.
“Women control 85 to 92 percent of household purchasing decisions and $31.8 trillion in global spending, but they’ve been socialized to second-guess their choices and seek external validation,” she told the E-Commerce Times. “When brands treat support as a back-office function, they’re accidentally abandoning customers at the exact moment inherited financial beliefs are screaming ‘you’re making the wrong choice.’”
“Women make repeat purchases 2.3 times more frequently than men when they trust a brand, but that trust shatters the moment support delays confirm their socialized fear that they made the ‘wrong’ choice,” Graves said.
She warned retailers: “Your highest-value customers aren’t the ones who never need support. They’re the ones experiencing Purchase Panic who could become loyal advocates if you validate their decision instead of abandoning them.”
Always-On Support Replaces Tickets
eDesk’s Cummings noted that the evolution of e-commerce has reached a point at which an organization’s ability to support customers through human agents is no longer feasible.
“As we move forward, the objective of every organization will be to operate in an always-on mode, enabling them to provide answers to customer service inquiries as they arise,” he said.
“To remain competitive in this environment,” he continued, “the support architecture needs to be less platform-focused and more customer-focused, meaning there needs to be intelligence above the different channels so the brand can draw on all its order information and policy knowledge as one.”
“We are witnessing the slow phase-out of the ‘support ticket’ model for emerging online retail brands,” added ASG’s Inverdale.
“Customer service is no longer a back-office ‘cost center,’” he said. “It is a front-facing sales function.”
“In the past, retail service was asynchronous — send an email, wait 24 hours, get a reply,” he continued. “Today, service is social and synchronous.”
“On TikTok or Instagram, a customer’s question in the comments can be categorized as a public ‘sales pitch,’” he explained. “If the brand responds instantly and helpfully, they don’t just satisfy one customer, they provide social proof to thousands of others watching.”
“The shift from phone/email to chat/social means that the brands that treat support as a real-time conversation are poised to dominate the next era of e-commerce,” he predicted.
