UK Companies Ignor Emails

44% of major UK companies are losing revenue by ignoring their emails from their customers!

Research performed by eGain taken place between December 2006 and March 2007, queried 125 major UK companies across an array of industry sectors.

Analysts acted as potential customers and submitted forms and emails regarding the companies products or services to see what kind of response they would get. These companies were then evaluated on the speed and quality of response.

The survey revealed that a massive 38% of companies did not respond to emails and 6% did not even offer email contact on their websites!

The study also revealed that 67% of companies failed to respond within 24 hours and only 18% of companies sent an automatic acknowledgement as an initial response to customer’s emails.

Telecommunications services were the worst performers where 58% of emails sent were totally ignored, whilst the retail sector were the best performers who gave some kind of response to 70% of emails sent.

The survey has proved to be shocking! It really is an area that seems to be lacking and must be very frustrating for the consumer. How do companies expect to sell their products and services to potential customers if they let them down at the first hurdle? First contact is something that is stressed upon in most businesses, and for those who submit forms and send emails, how you respond as a company will determine whether the potential customer will purchase your product or take up your service.

This really is a lesson for us all and a reveals an area in customer service that businesses are lacking.

Online Ad Spend

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More and more businesses are recognising the potential of selling their products and services online.

Online ad spend grew more than any other UK advertising channel in 2006, according to a report released by the Advertising Association.

Online ad spend has risen by 50% , in excess of £2bn and now constitutes 10.6% of the entire market.

TV advertising was down by 4.7% (£4.6bn) and press was down by 2.7% (8.4bn)

These figures show that online advertising is proving to be a good resource for businesses.

More and more people are looking for products and services in the confort of their own home and are willing to purchase products and take up services online.

If you have your own online business, and not yet taking advantage of selling online, this might be something worth considering to gain more business, growth and branding for your products.

Check out our Pay per click management service for more information on how you can promote your products or services online.

Google Desktop Cross-site scripting

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An Application Security Trend Report has today been released by Cenzic Inc.

The top 10 vulnerabilities in Commercial and Open Source Web Applications from Q1 2007 included software offered freely by Google, called Google Desktop:

Multiple vulnerabilities were discovered in Google Desktop taht allow a remote attacker to conduct cross-site scripting attacks. The Desktop Preferences pages of Google Desktop does not properly filter script code from user input when using the “under” keyword. Under certain circumstances a remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to compromise the machine running Google Desktop appliation. The code will be able to access data on the users system with privileges of the Google Desktop application.

In general, Cross-site scripting is where a web application gathers malicious data from a user. The malicious data could be in the form of a link on a webpage you have clicked on. The link will look just like a normal link, however the malicious portion of the link will have been encoded into the link. When clicked on, this link will create and send data to the encoder.

So how can Cross-site scripting affect you?

Often attackers will inject JavaScript, VBScript, ActiveX, HTML, or Flash into a vulnerable application to fool a user (Read below for further details) in order to gather data from them. Everything from account hijacking, changing of user settings, cookie theft/poisoning, or false advertising is possible. New malicious uses are being found every day for XSS attacks. The post below by Brett Moore brings up a good point with regard to “Denial Of Service”, and potential “auto-attacking” of hosts if a user simply reads a post on a message board.

Google Desktop is a desktop search application enables you to search over your email, files, music, photos, chats, Gmail, web pages that you’ve viewed in the past. Once downloaded and installed Google Desktop starts indexing the email, files and web history stored on your computer.

For more information on Cross-site scripting and how you can be affected, visit CGI Security

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