How to use Outlook email statistics to power up your customer-facing teams

If you’re a previous reader of this blog, you’ll know how much we believe in the importance of email analytics as an essential tool for customer-facing teams. Too often, teams lack the ability to track and monitor key areas of their email performance, leaving them to the whims of overflowing inboxes.

Leveraging data insights about average reply times, peak email traffic periods, highest volume mailboxes, time to resolve customer queries, and adherence to service-level agreements empowers customer-facing teams and transforms their performance.

By using this data, customer-facing teams can make adjustments to their strategies to ensure every customer enjoys the highest levels of service quality and responsiveness.

Unfortunately, most business email platforms simply lack native email analytics capabilities. At least, the data they offer lack the insight and scope needed to really enhance and transform customer experiences.

For teams working in Microsoft’s hugely popular Outlook email platform, the lack of data insights can be a real struggle. With virtually no way to measure customer service-related metrics using Outlook’s native functionality, teams will be left scratching their heads over their email productivity.

The best-performing customer service teams know that the only way to uncover important email insights is to use email analytics software for Outlook.

Let’s take a closer look at why that’s important, what to look for, and how to get started.

 Core Outlook email metrics you should pay attention to:

 Not all email metrics are equally useful to every team. Some teams may want to focus more on quickly resolving inbound customer service requests, while others will aim to optimize their email first-response time.

Individual users could be looking for an easy way to track customer queries from initial receipt to closure, while groups or those using shared mailboxes may need a way to make sure no email goes unanswered.

Whatever the needs of your team, there are some core Outlook email metrics every team should pay attention to, including:

 

Total email volumes

This helps you see how many emails your teams or individual agents receive per day, per week and per month. Top-performing customer-facing teams also leverage timetoreply to track and monitor peak email volume times, and see which times of the day – and days of the week – are the busiest per agent or overall.

 

Initial email reply time

Email responsiveness is essential to the success of any customer-facing team. But in a survey of more than 1000 companies, the average time it took to reply to an incoming mail was over twelve hours. Email performance optimization tools such as timetoreply empowers customer-facing teams by tracking how quickly emails are answered. The tool’s automation capabilities also alerts managers or customer success agents when an email is left unanswered for too long.

 

Overall email reply time

It’s not only the initial reply time that is important. Speedy responses to customer emails and quick resolution of customer queries contribute to a positive customer experience and helps build loyalty with even the most difficult customer.

timetoreply mailbox leader board

Custom SLA goals

The best Outlook email performance optimization tools will allow you to set custom SLAs and track your team’s activity against those SLAs. Does a customer expect her queries to be resolved within 24 hours? Use the built-in functionality of tools such as timetoreply to set custom SLAs and track the customer-facing team’s activity against that. 

 

Steps to get statistical reports on sent and received Outlook emails

We’ve noted earlier in this article that Outlook offers precious little native email analytics capability.

If your company’s customer service success depends on how quickly you can resolve inbound requests, you’ll need to know certain vital statistics. Understanding your current average reply time or benchmarking your time-to-resolution can help you set measurable goals that ensure your service levels continue to rise.

However, other than manually trawling through individual or shared mailboxes for sent and received emails and then capturing that data on a spreadsheet, you simply won’t gain that level of insight using Outlook’s standard functionality.

Instead, customer-facing teams looking to unlock the power of Outlook email analytics need to seek a specialized solution. timetoreply is the only email analytics software that easily integrates with Outlook and empowers teams with rich data into their email productivity.

timetoreply can be deployed in minutes, and immediately starts generating data insights into a broad range of email-related metrics.

If you’re not sure how to deploy timetoreply, you can find helpful videos here.

Introducing timetoreply Optimizer

Empower your team members to optimize their email performance in real-time with timetoreply’s Optimizer…the smart co-pilot for high performing teams.

🔵 100% customizable - choose the most important email metric for your team to work to
🔵 Smart recommendations - automatic prioritization of important emails
🔵 Live collaboration - power up your efficiency by assigning emails to other team members
🔵 AI-powered enhancements (coming soon) - get the inside track

With timetoreply’s Optimizer, your customer-facing teams will not only track their email performance, but transform it – in real time.
 

Free with Pro and Elite price plans. See more info here.

With timetoreply in place, getting statistics reports on sent and received Outlook emails is suddenly a far easier prospect. Here’s how it works:

 

🔵 1 Click on Reports. This takes you to the report overview page where you can view data for your entire account or for specific mailboxes.

 

🔵 2 Select your date range, and choose whether you want stats for everyone in the company (or a specific mailbox) and everyone your company (or the selected mailbox) communicates with externally.

 

🔵 3 You can also click on More Settings to get access to numerous additional search settings, for example how many inbound emails have not received a reply.

 

🔵 4 Next, you can see the volumes of conversations, including number of emails received and sent. You can click on +More to see more information about each of these volumes.

 

🔵 5 For a detailed breakdown of all your email metrics, you can click on +MORE below the Conversation stats to get access to everything from total conversations and completion ratios to average initial reply times and overall reply times.

 

If you need help understanding how to use timetoreply for your Outlook email analytics, please get in touch and we’ll gladly help.

 

Importance of knowing Outlook email statistics

team meeting

 

1. Native Outlook email analytics are underwhelming (to say the least)

 

Outlook may be the world’s preferred business email platform, but its native email analytics are underwhelming, to say the least.

 

Outlook does not provide an easy way to track and measure email response times, average time to reply to emails, time to resolve email queries, and other key email metrics that are essential for high-performance customer-facing teams.

 

Any team that relies on Outlook to manage incoming customer and sales queries can unlock real-time data insights through timetoreply’s easy-to-use and quick-to-deploy email performance optimization tool for Outlook.

 

With timetoreply your customer-facing teams can supercharge their email productivity by tracking and measuring a broad range of email-related KPIs.

 

2. Missing important customer emails sucks (for you and for the customer)

While businesses recognize how important their customers are, an alarming number of companies do not respond to customer requests. In fact, a recent study concluded that up to two-thirds of companies don’t respond to every customer service email.

 

Leaving a customer service request unanswered could result in disappointed customers and missed revenue. This can seriously damage the customer experience and negatively impact your reputation, revenue and customer retention.

 

One reason for slow responses to customer emails is a lack of visibility over unanswered emails. We all know what it is like to have an overflowing inbox – it’s easy to miss or forget about an email in that chaos.

 

timetoreply’s real-time alert system notifies teams and individuals when an email is still waiting for a response. By setting custom lead response times your team members will be informed in real-time when an email is reaching the deadline for a response, helping you avoid the embarrassment of missing an important email.

3. If you can measure it, you can manage it

 

It’s really hard to manage something if you can’t measure it. That’s why successful customer-facing teams rely on timetoreply to track and measure individual and team mailboxes.

 

Using the data-driven insights produced by our platform, customer-facing teams can identify areas for improvement and implement new policies to streamline their responses.

 

Using data generated by our platform, customer-facing teams can improve their email response times and deliver a consistent, positive customer experience.

 

Tracking Microsoft Office email stats using timetoreply

 

We’ve established a number of important Outlook email statistics to pay attention to, especially if you are in a customer-facing team that demands high levels of responsiveness and speed. 

 

But what are the benefits of going the extra mile with your Outlook email statistics? Why do top customer-facing teams depend on timetoreply’s Outlook analytics software to give them the data insights they need to improve their performance and productivity?

 

 

In short, using Outlook email analytics software can unlock a range of benefits, including:

 

1. Supercharge your email to become a potent internal and external communication channel

Filter and analyse email activity using timetoreply’s ERMS software. By keeping track of email threads, teams can ensure that no important emails are lost, and all tasks are actioned. Teams no longer have to waste time scrolling through strings of emails looking for information that can easily be found through the ERMS filtering functionality.

 

 2. Never miss important emails

Outlook email analytics tools such as timetoreply allow you to create a customized email response strategy for individual teams. If an email goes unanswered for too long the software will send a real-time alert to the relevant team members reminding them to act. Now you can rest assured that all inbound customer requests have been responded to and are receiving the care needed to resolve the query.

 

 3. Gain efficiency through data-driven insights

Using an Outlook email analytics tool can enable better performance and efficiency by providing helpful insights into the performance of teams. Managers benefit from increased visibility of average response times and peak hours for inbound emails so they can identify areas for improvement and streamlining. Increase efficiency across your customer-facing teams with these valuable data-driven insights.

 

4. Easy integration with Outlook, Gmail

timetoreply’s easy integration with 365, Outlook and Gmail ensures your team’s productivity is not interrupted. Its seamless integration allows your team to continue working while gaining the benefits of filtering, insights and alerts. Simply plug and play to start gaining new insights into your team’s email performance.

 

5. Spend more time on high-value tasks

Reduce time spent on routine, low-value tasks. Using ERMS software enables you to create an expanded set of automation rules, from auto-replies to automatically assigning tasks to team members. This allows ERMS to take care of mundane low-value tasks while your team focuses on closing deals and impressing customers.

Schedule a demo now to see how the power of email analytics can transform your customer experience.

 

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