Studies have found that 80% of customers highlight the speed of response as a vital part of customer service.
Although this may seem obvious, many businesses fail to identify the benefits of a speedy reply, often relying on standard email tools. Smart businesses see the opportunity presented to them by being able to reply to messages more efficiently than their competitors.
In this article, we explore some of the best tools on the market for improving and benefitting from a better email response time.
We kick this article off with timetoreply’s available tools. The platform offered by timetoreply offers an easy-to-navigate suite of tools to help customer-facing teams improve email performance.
timetoreply Optimizer is an add-on to the timetoreply platform that helps individuals optimize their email performance in real time.
How does it accomplish this? By providing a set of key email metrics right in a window within their Outlook and Gmail mail client, giving users an at-a-glance view into how their response times compare to their team’s.
timetoreply also takes data on email response times and creates helpful ratios. These ratios provide a clear indicator of the overall health of your reply process and can be used to very quickly assess where and when action needs to be taken.
The timetoreply ratios are also powerful tools in setting targets for your sales or customer service team. For example, once an initial inquiry comes in, your team must reply as soon as possible. Setting a target for the average time to respond to an initial message is a good way to ensure overall proactivity.
This ratio could look like this:
Average time to reply to the first message = time to reply to all first messages / total number of first messages
If your team’s current average time to reply to the first message is 120 minutes, you may start by trying to cut this down to 90 minutes. By assessing each team member’s average time to reply, you will easily identify where potential issues are and additional support may need to be allocated.
Notably, timetoreply also includes real-time alerts that you can set up in order to never miss a priority lead or customer email again.
Finally, you can use the timetoreply platform to view who your team members are interacting with the most. With a clear idea of who your most valuable customers are, you can ensure that resource is focused on the customers who offer the very best return.
Many sales and customer service teams use TextExpander to help them rapidly increase their response time.
The smart tool can be used to create short snippets that automatically bring up text. As most professionals in sales and customer service roles find themselves regularly sending the same information, creating snippets for these pieces of information means responses can be typed and sent in a matter of seconds, rather than the usual minutes.
Let’s say you are a sales professional working for a mobile phone company and you are contacted by a customer asking about the features of a particular mobile phone. It is likely that you have answered this question many times before and have all the details they need to hand. By having a snippet ready, just a few taps on the keyboard, and your answer will automatically appear.
By using snippets when replying to emails, you are not only helping yourself reply more rapidly, but you are also freeing up time to reply to further inquiries promptly.
Using a quality Customer Relationship Management system like Close is a smart way to improve your email response time. CRM’s are crucial to many sales and customer service teams, proving them with one central location for the recording of and access to data.
Having this information to hand makes it significantly easier and quicker to assess every potential lead at any moment in time. Take for example a new lead being sent to a sales team, by accessing the CRM a team manager can quickly identify whether that lead has interacted with the business before, who they dealt with, and find out any other information about them that may be on record.
Not only does this help managers quickly assess and distribute leads, but it also provides them with crucial information that may inform a response strategy.
On some occasions, an entirely new email or chunk of information will need to be written in response to an incoming inquiry. In these instances, Grammarly can be a powerful tool to help you ensure the quality of your writing is up to standard.
Grammarly goes one step beyond a traditional spell checker and offers real-time feedback on every aspect of your writing from spelling, grammar, and punctuation to word choices and tone of voice.
Using a platform like this delivers confidence that your emails will read well without the need for multiple proofreads or a separate person checking it over. It also helps maintain a level of professionalism in your replies, limiting the potential for embarrassing spelling mistakes and other errors.
Improving your email response times give you a competitive edge over your competitors. As many customers will reach out to multiple suppliers at once, it is those who can answer their questions the quickest who are most likely to win their business.
Using the tools we have highlighted in this article will put you in the best position to serve your customer needs.
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