Internet service providers are poor at responding to inquiries originating on their websites, seemingly unaware that 78% of sales from customer inquiries go to the company that responds first. This is according to a survey by Cape Town-based firm Timetoreply, which found that more than a quarter of these ISPs did not respond to potential customers at all.The survey, conducted anonymously from June last year to this March, polled 156 of the country's biggest ISPs.Dane Spear, MD of Timetoreply, said more than 28% of ISPs did not reply to web inquiries."Perhaps more disappointing is that only 2% of all ISPS surveyed actually came back to us in less than 30 minutes, the fastest replying in a respectable two minutes," he said.Spear said it was irrelevant whether this tardiness was due to apathy, disorganisation from sales people or slow communication between technical and sales departments because the result was the same: the disappointed customers were lost to competitors.To come to its findings, Timetoreply e-mailed a series of mock inquiries at various intervals to the ISPs, either directly or through their online web forms from various e-mail addresses.The time it took for inquiries to be addressed was logged and ranked in terms of timelinessWhen responses to inquiries came back in fewer than 30 minutes the ISPs fell into the "hare" category; if the time taken to reply was from 30 minutes to a day later they were put in the sheep category; if it took more than a day, companies were categorised as tortoises; and if they didn't respond at all they were labelled dead ducks. ..