Real-time. What is real-time? I guess that depends on who you speak to. 5 secs, 5 mins, 5 hours, 5 days? Experts would say real-time is immediate, brands would say a little longer, consumers perhaps even shorter. My view is that the brand needs to define what real-time means to them. In most cases, although this is just my opinion, I am sure the consumer would prefer a response that is correct, than simply something delivered in real-time.
Of course, in practice and after a bit of practice, brands can probably find that alot of responses that are needed in real-time are queries they have answered before. Simply a response in the same way FAQs work, might suffice alot of questions. However, realistically, brands aren’t in the position to respond to alot of queries in real-time, some things just simply take longer.
Right Answer, seems a much better way of responding than “hey, we gave you the wrong answer, but did you see how damn quick we did it? – aren’t we shit hot!”. I’d much prefer coming back 24 hours later knowing that the answer I was getting had been researched, the right people had been involved and I could walk away happy.
