Although high-tech companies in the U.S. are doing a better job of respecting the privacy of their online customers, they could be more responsive to customer needs, according to a new study on the respect shown to customers by computer products and services companies.

"The general standard of privacy across the whole industry has actually increased slightly in terms of respect for the customer"s privacy," said Terry Golesworthy, president of The Customer Respect Group in Boston, which conducted the survey. "Responsiveness continues to be major issue."

For its "Second Quarter 2005 Online Customer Respect Study," which was released this week, The Customer Respect Group reviewed the Web sites of 38 of the largest computer products and services firms in the U.S.

The study measured corporate performance from an online customer"s perspective and assigned a Customer Respect Index rating on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the best score.

While the industry as a whole improved its privacy score from 6.4 in the last report to 6.8 in the latest study, most of that improvement was attributed to a large increase from the top performing companies, Golesworthy said. The number of companies scoring "excellent" on privacy issues rose from six to 10 in the latest report. Topping that list were IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Veritas Software Corp., he said.

Golesworthy said the top 25 percent of the computer products and services industry did significantly better in the area of privacy. "Some of the companies did it tremendously well -- they put very strong privacy policies into place. They never share your data, never do anything you don"t tell them to do and allow people to opt in," he said.

Even so, the scores -- and privacy practices in the industry -- remained inconsistent, he said. In terms of sharing personal data with third parties, the high-tech industry scored only about average compared with all other industries, according to the study.

And while companies in most other industries fared better in terms of customer responsiveness, that wasn"t the case in the high-tech industry, Golesworthy said. "We still had 27 percent of all e-mails not being responded to," he said.

"HP told us they"re trying to return all e-mails within the hour because it"s important for them to be responsive, but the other high-tech firms think they don"t need to respond at all. So we"re seeing a tremendous difference in the high-tech companies" attitudes toward electronic communication," he said.

That"s because most companies view incoming e-mail as spam, he said. "To be fair to them, many of them have ways to deal with their customers, but we"re talking about consumers who are interested in the product and want to ask questions before they buy it," he said.

Golesworthy said some organizations don"t even allow consumers to send an e-mail at all, though they did provide telephone numbers.

The high-tech industry scored below average in terms of online simplicity, or how quickly a customer could find key information on a company"s site, Golesworthy said. Only 42 percent of the firms surveyed provided a list of frequently asked questions, a site search feature and a site map to assist customers.

The Customer Respect Group interviewed a representative sample of the adult Internet population and analyzed more than 2,000 Web sites across a variety of industries to determine the attributes of an online customer experience. These attributes include Web site simplicity (ease of navigation), responsiveness to inquiries, respect for customer privacy, attitude (the customer focus of a site), transparency (open and honest policies) and principles (value and respect for customer data).

Combined, those values are used to come up with a company"s overall Customer Respect Index rating.