What is ERMS Software and how can it benefit my business?

 

Email is the most popular communication tool in business, with over 333 billion emails sent every day. The communication volume between consumers and companies is rapidly growing as more of our daily interactions become digitized.

As more consumers choose to send an email over making a phone call, it has become increasingly important to filter and track emails to ensure none are missed and all are responded to within the ideal timeframe.

When a business takes too long to respond to an incoming sales lead, it may fail to convert the lead and ultimately lose the prospect to a competitor. Take too long to resolve a customer query, and you may anger the customer or even lose them to a more efficient competitor.

How can you support customer and sales teams to handle large volumes of incoming emails effectively and provide quick, satisfactory responses to all queries? One solution is to deploy an Email Response Management System that enables automation and efficiency in customer-facing operations.

 

What is ERMS?

 

Email Response Management System (ERMS) software is a tool that integrates with popular email platforms to help companies organize and streamline their email activity. ERMS software maximizes productivity and enhances sales and customer service success by assisting teams in tracking response times and providing visibility on every email received.

With the help of an ERMS, companies can ensure they respond to queries on time for maximum success.

 

Challenges of email response management

 

1. Handling multiple customers simultaneously

 

Since email is the preferred communication channel between customers and businesses, customer-facing teams are forced to handle multiple queries and customers simultaneously. If a query is complex and takes time to answer, this may leave unanswered emails to pile up, generating irritated customers and a bottleneck in the system.

 

2. Not understanding customer expectations

 

Customers demand a friendly timeous reply that effectively answers their questions. But what if customer-facing teams do not know their customers’ expectations regarding response time? Teams are bound to fail to meet an unknown expectation. Education about optimal email response times is a necessity for a winning team.

 

3. Workflows are not optimized

 

Most companies use central email addresses that may become overwhelmed as customer queries stream in. Emails may get lost without intelligent re-direction to smaller teams, and as we know, customers do not like waiting for a response.

 

4. Lack of visibility

 

A successful sales and customer strategy relies on a consistent sales cadence to boost conversion rates. When teams handle high volumes of email traffic, tracking a customer through the sales funnel can be challenging. An effective ERMS tool helps teams optimise their performance by tracking the number of touches, the lead source, and the deal status. This visibility allows teams to focus on the right sales touch at the right time with the right customer, to drive revenue growth.

 

Benefits of using an email response management system

 

ERMS software can help supercharge your team’s performance by automatically filtering emails, analyzing email activity, logging email threads, tracking deals and alerting team members to essential emails waiting for a response. This kind of visibility and tracking empowers teams to take control of their inboxes and effectively use email to close deals and increase revenue.

 

1. Track emails and send real-time alerts

 

ERMS software with built-in alert systems can help teams keep track of emails waiting for a response. Think of it as your team’s very own PA tracking which emails need a reply and by when. With this kind of visibility, teams can ensure every email receives a timely response, helping close more sales and keep customers happy.

 

2. Improve average response times

 

ERMS provides valuable insights into various teams’ performance, enabling better performance and efficiency. Data-driven insights offer benchmarks to measure the improvement of average response times. Sales teams can outsmart competitors to close more deals when consistently improving average response times.

 

3. Easily integrate with Outlook, Gmail

 

The best ERMS tools, such as timetoreply, offer quick and easy integration with Microsoft 365, Outlook and Gmail to immediately unlock insights without disrupting workflow. Simply plug and play to start optimizing and supercharging your email platform.

 

4. Track closed deals in real-time

 

A good ERMS tool helps you keep track of the active deals in your sales pipeline. With instant visibility of deal stages across all leads and by lead source, your business can better understand future revenue and allocate the required resources to bring deals toward closure.

 

5. Optimise the cadence of touches

 

Optimize the sequence of touchpoints to deepen your customer relationship and ultimately bring prospects toward deal completion. Businesses can create a successful cadence strategy that boosts revenue and streamlines the sales pipeline by keeping track of customers, their interactions with your company, and their preferred channels.

 

Who should use ERMS?

 

Customer facing-teams

 

Excellent customer service is vital for business success. And yet satisfying customers has become trickier as customer expectations rise amid market competition.

Answering customer service email requests quickly and accurately is not as easy as it may sound, especially when dealing with large volumes of incoming mail. Relying on the standard built-in functionality of email platforms such as Outlook and Gmail will not differentiate your business from its competitors.

timetoreply Optimiser can help customer service managers unlock exceptional levels of customer service ensuring your business stands out from the crowd. In fact, our Optimiser tool has helped improve response times, reducing the average reply time from seven hours to only two hours.

By providing accurate, actionable data insights into email performance, timetoreply helps teams better understand email volumes and track essential emails and SLAs. Give customers the responsive care they deserve by harnessing quick response times, goal-setting, and real-time alerts.

 

Features to look for in an email response management software

 

Not all Email Response Management Software tools offer the features necessary for success. What features should you be looking for? We have listed the key elements that will enhance the performance of your sales and customer service teams:

 

1. Safe and secure for all major email providers

 

Ensure your Email Response Management Software tool can integrate with your email platform of choice, whether your teams run on Outlook or Gmail. Advanced security capabilities will also ensure confidential information is kept safe while keeping you compliant with data and privacy regulations.

timetoreply is the only Email Response Management Software tool that works with Gmail and Outlook. Our cloud-based platform is ISO 27001 certified and supports compliance with a broad range of global data and privacy regulations.

 

2. Delivers valuable insights

 

Ensure your team can access valuable data insights that will inform your sales and customer service strategy. You want real-time, easy-to-understand tracking that gives complete visibility over average email response times, peak email traffic periods, deals stages and team performance against set SLAs.

timetoreply offers multiple actionable data insights to identify customer service or sales bottlenecks to boost response times, sales conversions and customer service levels.

 

3. Raw data export capability

 

Any good Email Response Management Software tool will provide data insights into email performance. However, business leaders may want to mine the data for deeper insights. Ensure you can access data export functionality when choosing the ideal Email Response Management Software tool for your teams.

timetoreply offers you access to all the data so you can continue to mine the data for further insights.

 

4. Set unique goals and SLAs

 

A strategically minded business will want to create customer service and sales response time goals according to current staff capabilities and agreed sales targets while considering market conditions and customer expectations.

Timetoreply allows customer service and sales teams to set and track email reply time goals, boosting productivity and ensuring every team member works toward closing the email response time gap.

 

Key takeaways

An ERMS can boost sales and customer service levels by helping teams reduce response times and become more productive. Companies can close more deals, reduce customer churn, and drive bottom-line results with more focused sales and customer service teams.

For sales and customer service teams looking for an easy-to-use tool that can work in any email environment and deliver immediate improvements, timetoreply is the best solution on the market today.

 

 

 

timetoreply is the only ERMS solution that can easily integrate with any email environment and a broad range of third-party applications. Our ERMS solution offers world-class security and enables compliance with most global data and privacy regulations.

Get in touch with us, book a demo and improve customer service capabilities.

 

 

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