The saying “Time is money” has never been more true.
The rapid pace of modern life means speed is often a major competitive advantage to businesses, especially for customer service and sales-related activities.
And with customer expectations at an all-time high, businesses that fail to provide timely, accurate responses to incoming emails will quickly lose out to their more efficient and customer-friendly competitors.
Data confirms this: companies that respond to emails within five minutes are seven times more likely to qualify leads.
But how can organisations using Microsoft’s hugely popular Outlook business email platform track and measure their teams’ email performance?
Despite its popularity as a primary email client for millions of users around the world, there is virtually no way to measure important sales- and customer service related metrics on Outlook. Except, that is, for timetoreply.
If you want to measure and track email response time in Microsoft Outlook or O365, you can use timetoreply, the only Outlook analytics software available for teams.
Our powerful plug-and-play analytics suite for Microsoft Outlook and O365 enables sales and customer-facing teams to track, measure and improve a broad range of email metrics. This helps improve average response times, prevents important emails from going unanswered, and boosts the overall email performance of your vital customer-facing teams.
And as you generate more and more data about your teams’ email performance, you gain valuable insights into trends – peak traffic times, average response times, how quickly you resolve customer queries – that can drive greater customer satisfaction and supercharge your sales success.
Learn more about the best Outlook analytics tools here
3 Steps to track email response time in Outlook
Want to start tracking vital metrics around your teams’ email response times in Outlook? Follow this easy three-step guide to unlock granular details about your teams’ performance and improve your email interactions with customers and prospects.
Tracking the average time it takes teams and individuals to respond to customer or prospect emails is one of the most important among all the metrics tracked by timetoreply. Understanding the length of time it takes to respond to important incoming emails is critical to delivering outstanding customer service and successfully closing sales.
timetoreply gives you two important average reply time metrics to track. The first, ‘Average Initial Reply Time’, relates to the time it takes your teams to reply to the first email in a conversation, for example from a new sales lead or potential customer.
This is one of the most important metrics to track: usually, these senders have not prior commitment to the conversation and will readily go to a competitor should their correspondence not receive the requisite and timely attention.
The second average that timetoreply tracks is ‘Overall Reply Time’, which takes into account all emails – initial outreach and replies – to give you a broader view of how quickly your teams are responding to emails.
In both cases, the quicker the reply times, the better for customer service and sales success and, ultimately, for your business. However, if you’re a more sales-focused business, timetoreply offers the option to prioritise the all-important initial emails which will in return improve your sales success and lead to quicker sales closures.
Trying to understand how quickly different teams within your business are responding to vital customer and prospect emails requires a more granular level of detail than simply tracking your business’ overall response times.
Most businesses have multiple teams that operate on varying degrees of efficiency and speed, depending on their performance. To see which teams are razor-sharp at replying to emails – and which ones could do with some more sharpening – you need segmentation.
Using timetoreply with Outlook allows you to filter your average response times by individual users or teams. You can even compare the speed at which teams respond to direct emails compared to web forms.
It’s not only teams that benefit from segmentation. timetoreply will even tell you what percentage of emails fell within specific response times. This enables you to track how many emails are responded to within that customer sweet spot of five minutes.
It’s a widely held belief that you simply can’t manage what you can’t measure. When your goal is to improve your teams’ email performance, you want to close the gap between receiving emails and responding to customers and prospects. For this, you need accurate metrics to inform what other processes you put in place to improve your teams’ performance.
With the correct systems in place to ensure teams are acting on incoming emails with speed and efficiency, you’ll want to measure their progress every step of the way.
timetoreply provides you and your teams with reports that showcase key metrics around how users are performing over any given time period.
Through easy-to-understand graphs and other visual tools, our software will allow you to see at a glance how your team is performing and where further improvement is needed.
Still not sure why it’s vital to track your email response times in Outlook? Consider the following benefits of accurate data and analytics around your team’s email performance.
Using a tool to track email response times allows you to generate vital data-driven insights into the performance of your sales and customer-facing teams.
This will help you identify where further improvement is needed, helping you build an effective, customer-centric business that resolves customer queries more quickly and closes sales more effectively.
If the customer truly is king, then leaving customer queries unanswered or unattended will be ruinous to your company’s reputation and customer retention.
Using a tool to track email response times ensures you stay at the pulse of your customers’ expectations, leading to happier customers that will gladly keep spending money with you.
The alternative? Customer attrition that knocks revenue and makes it harder to scale your business.
Data indicates that more than three-quarters of sales go to the first company that responds. Can your business really afford for customer sales queries to go unattended for hours, even days?
Teams using timetoreply to track email response times can close more deals faster by improving the speed at which first responses to inbound mails are made. This helps you save marketing dollars by ensuring every hot lead is nurtured and looked after without ever going cold from lack of attention.
Nothing says “I care about my customers” better than quick and effective responses to their questions and queries. However, even the best customer-facing teams can have emails slip through the cracks, leading to unhappy customers that are more likely to take their business to one of your competitors.
Using timetoreply, sales and customer-facing teams can create real-time alerts to ensure emails from important customers never go unanswered for too long.
There is currently no built-in function in Outlook to track or measure email response times. For teams that want to benchmark their email performance by tracking response times – along with a host of other data-driven insights – the only solution that integrates with Outlook is timetoreply.
Our easy-to-use, plug-and-play solution quickly integrates with Outlook to instantly start generating vital insights into the email performance of your customer service and sales teams. This enables you to know exactly how long each mailbox takes to reply to internal or external emails, while real-time alerts ensures that no important emails slip through the cracks and remain unanswered.
Timetoreply is the only email analytics solution that works with all Outlook and Office365 email clients. Our email management software enables you to understand your team’s business email metrics, including average email reply times, email volumes per individual or shared mailbox, and time to complete customer service queries.
In addition, timetoreply provides sales and customer-facing teams with an easy-to-use tool closing email threads from their Outlook inbox without the need for a standalone ticketing system. Scheduled reports further provide granular insight into the total performance of teams operating in Outlook or O365, while real-time alerts ensures every important email is answered quickly and efficiently.
Despite its popularity, Microsoft Outlook doesn’t offer users an easy way to track and measure vital email metrics including reply times, email volumes, team and individual performance or broader trends.
However, thanks to timetoreply’s easy-to-use and quick-to-deploy email analytics tool, customer and sales teams can now unlock the power of data in their email activities, allowing them to benchmark performance and track improvements.
For any team that handles customer or sales queries from their Outlook or O365 inboxes, timetoreply is an invaluable ally in the fight for superior customer service and sales excellence.
Get started with a 15-day free trial today to see how timetoreply can supercharge your team’s email performance.
Trusted by high-performing inbound sales teams and customer-facing teams globally.
Close more deals and delight more customers with the faster, smarter, deeper email analytics and performance optimization software that works straight from your team’s inbox.