Australian brands are failing to provide quality experiences for customers making enquiries via the Facebook Messenger app, research from the country’s only online specialist messaging app agency, On Message, has revealed.

The Sydney agency asked questions of equivalent businesses in the airline, retail, beverage, banking and telco sectors in Australia, the US and UK and evaluated them based on speed and quality of response.

Overall, companies in the US came out top in in terms of both speed and quality of replies to customer questions using Messenger, followed by Australia, with the UK lagging in third.

In the airline category, the question ‘Do you have student prices?’ was asked to Virgin Australia, Virgin Atlantic and Virgin America using Messenger. Virgin America was the fastest to respond, replying in seven minutes, followed by Virgin Australia at 10 minutes and the UK’s Virgin Atlantic at 36 minutes.

For telcos, Verizon in the US was the quickest to respond to the question ‘Do you offer bill extensions for unpaid bills?’, followed by Telstra at 12 minutes with the UK’s BT not replying at all.

Messaging apps have 10.5 million active monthly users in Australia and are fast becoming our favourite tool for communicating. In April, Facebook Messenger opened up its platform to allow brands build high quality brand BOTS that deliver excellent customer experiences.

Douglas Nicol, partner at On Message said: “Our research shows that brands have a maximum to 10 minutes to respond to the consumer on a messaging app before it’s regarded as a fail and our research shows some Australian brands have not got their act together on this form of social.

“You need to understand this is a channel that requires marketers to think like customer service experts and customer service people to think like marketers. If you are not fast and useful for the consumer, you will be rejected.”