We have a strange issue related to the “Average contact response time” metric at the top of the messages page. This metric has typically been in the 10-15 hour range for us, but for the past couple of weeks it has been steadily climbing and is now over 28 hours.
We respond to the vast majority of our buyer messages through Seller Central within 12 hours or less
On rare occasions one or two might approach 15-20 hours, but we almost never go over that
We’re diligent about marking messages that don’t need a response as “No response needed”
Tried working with support to figure it out, but they were no help and said they had no way of knowing what was causing it and simply encouraged us to respond more quickly.
Has anyone else experienced this? Any speculations as to what could be causing it? I did see a post from a year or two ago indicating that some messages that were marked as no response needed weren’t getting flagged on Amazon’s end correctly. I’ve been thorough the last 60 days of our messages to verify that all were responded to or marked as no response needed.
Amazon is transitioning the email from the old platform (GUI) to the new platform (GUI). Maybe that has had some effect.
We get so very few customer contacts that we don’t have an “average contact response time” number (no contacts within a reporting period to calculate).
I’m not sure if this could be the cause or not, but do any messages show under the Reported Unresolved tab? I’ve noticed that customers now have the ability to mark that a sellers response hasn’t resolved their issue, and we receive no notification of this. Maybe them marking a message as such causes the response timer to start again?
Thank you, great suggestion.
Unfortunately, there are no messages shown under that tab. I also tried doing a message sear with unresolved as one of the filters and also had nothing returned.
This morning, all of the messaging health metrics but two (Cases requiring attention, Cases Resolved) normally at the top of the screen are missing. I’m wondering if they did in fact have a glitch and are fixing it?
Is the section missing from anyone else’s Messages screen too?
I have a feeling they once again did a big update just before a weekend. They never seem to check the code before pushing it live and then create all these problems over the weekend.
Do you reply to these emails through your email client or do you actually go into Amazon and reply from their messaging system?
There have been a few times we have replied through GMail and the reply for some odd reason doesn’t get reflected on Amazon and it still shows as unreplied to. It’s rare but it does happen….and it probably only takes 1-2 missed ones to push that response time way up.
Thanks, and good point. Because years ago we noticed the same thing that you described you described we always reply directly through the Amazon messaging system rather than through our email system.
We’re seeing the same as the other day - only Cases Requiring Attention and Cases Resolved are shown. The other metrics, including the problematic/erroneous one, are all gone.