Methodology · Responsiveness
Do they actually answer?
Every other trust signal can be scraped. Whether a company replies to a real person cannot — so we ask one, and report what happened.
Last updated 20 July 2026
How it works
We write one genuine question
A real pre-purchase question a customer would actually ask that specific business, based on what the company publishes. It is never a trick, never something they could not know, and never a question already answered on their homepage. Questions are reviewed and rejected if they are unfair or trivial.
We send it to a published business channel
Only to an address or contact form the company publishes for customers — never a personal address. It comes from an ordinary-looking address that does not identify AboutUs, because an enquiry announcing itself as a measurement would be answered differently and would measure nothing.
We wait, then follow up once
One polite follow-up if there is no reply, then we stop. No company receives more than one enquiry from us in a month.
We record what came back
Whether anyone replied, how long it took, how many messages it needed, and whether the answer was informative, clear, courteous, and actually responsive to the question.
We publish the exchange
The question we asked and the reply we received, verbatim and dated — with the name and contact details of whoever replied removed. You can read exactly what we asked and judge the answer yourself rather than trusting our summary.
What we do to stay fair
A measurement like this is easy to do badly. These are the things we do deliberately so a company is never marked down for something that is our fault:
- We vary difficulty on purpose and account for it. A company that ignores a simple question is telling you something very different from one that could not answer a genuinely hard one, so a missed hard question counts far less against them.
- We check our own question first. Every question is scored for whether a competent, willing person could actually answer it in one reply. If it fails that test we rewrite it rather than send it.
- We record which door we used. Many companies publish no support address at all, only a sales or general inbox. Where that is the only channel available we say so, because reaching the wrong department is context a reader needs.
- No channel means no score. If a company cannot be contacted by email, we report that as a fact — we do not score it badly for something we never measured.
- We never place orders or transact.We ask a question. We do not waste a company’s stock, time, or money.
If you are the business
You have three options, all free and all immediate:
- Reply to it. If we published an exchange and your answer is that the question went to the wrong inbox, or the reply was sent and never arrived, send us that and we will publish it alongside — in full, not summarised.
- Correct it. If we got a fact wrong, tell us and we will fix it. Claim your record by proving domain control and you can correct it yourself.
- Opt out. Email us and we will never send your company another enquiry. We will note on your record that measurement is excluded at your request — we will not pretend the silence was yours.
What this does not tell you
One enquiry is one data point. A company can miss a single email and be excellent; a company can answer ours briskly and still be difficult to deal with when money is involved. We report what happened when we asked, with the date and the question attached, and we build the picture up over time rather than declaring a verdict from one message. Read it as evidence, not as a character reference.
See also our privacy page, our terms, and the rest of our methodology.