Leveraging data to improve email response time performance for customer-facing teams

In the search for better customer experiences, speed is key. As customer experience guru Jay Baer says, two-thirds of customers consider speed as important as price when making a buying decision.

Quick customer service is key for companies to build lasting, positive relationships.

Act too slow, and customer loyalty goes out the window. In fact, 35% of customers are less loyal when a business responds slower than they expect. Slow service leads to frustration and dissatisfaction, and has a direct negative impact on the company’s bottom line.

This need for greater speed can heap pressure on already-pressured customer-facing teams. Which is why the best customer-facing teams leverage data to improve their email response times.

1. Understanding email response time:

Email response time is the measure of time between receiving a customer email and providing a response.

While various benchmarks exist for the ideal email response time in each industry, one thing is universal: the quicker you provide an adequate response to a customer email, the better for your business – and for your bottom line.

Delayed responses can lead to negative impressions: seven in ten customers in one study said they believe companies don’t care if their customers receive delayed responses. The result? Reduced customer loyalty, increased churn, and damage to the company brand and reputation.

2. The role of data-driven insights:

The best customer-facing teams use data to continuously improve their email response times. A data-driven approach helps customer-facing teams streamline their processes, improve the allocation of resources, and better meet customer expectations and preferences.

Using accurate data about a range of email response analytics also enables customer-facing teams to identify trends and patterns in customer interactions, improving their ability to solve problems, reduce bottlenecks, and deliver more personalized customer experiences.

3. Email analytics and performance metrics:

There’s a wide range of data types that teams could collect to improve their service levels. The most important ones for customer-facing teams include:

🔘 Average time to first reply (the average time it takes your team to respond to a customer’s first request)
🔘 Average time to reply (the average time to reply to all customer emails)
🔘 Average ticket resolution time (the average time it takes from first contact to successfully resolve a customer query)

It’s near-impossible to manually keep track of reply times and ticket resolution times, especially in busy team environments with high email volumes.

The most successful customer-facing teams use email performance optimization software to track a range of email metrics and produce data-rich reports about the team’s email performance.

4. Tools and techniques for improvement:

Most email platforms offer some basic functionality that can help customer-facing teams optimize their email performance and improve response times. Gmail and Outlook offer users the option to create folders or labels, color-code emails to differentiate between different categories of email – for example red for urgent, green for follow-up, etc. – and email filters and rules to automatically filter incoming emails.

However these tools are limited in their ability to drive major improvements in email response times. Here, teams should use dedicated specialist email performance optimisation tools that offer automation and data reporting capabilities beyond stock-standard email platform options.

Tools such as timetoreply Optimizer integrates with email platforms and displays live performance stats, makes smart recommendations, and offers customizable insights into a broad range of email performance metrics.

By tailoring tools such as timetoreply Optimizer to focus on what is most important to your business, you empower your customer-facing teams with the support and insight they need to improve their email response times.

5. Case studies and best practices:

Companies that empower their customer-facing teams with data significantly improve their email response times and deliver superior customer experiences. Take Hit Promotional Products, a US-based promotional products supplier.

The company chose timetoreply to bring increased visibility to customer emails and provide helpful insights into various elements of its customer-facing operations. Since the vast majority of its customer interactions are over email, Hit Promo wanted to empower its 175-strong customer-facing team with data that could drive improvements in customer experiences and cut down reply times.

As Shannon Sylva, Chief Experience Officer at Hit Promo says, “One thing is clear: the more we use timetoreply, the better our customer experience will become.”

Customer-facing teams seeking to leverage data to reduce response times and improve customer experiences should take valuable learnings from companies such as Hit Promo, including:

🔘 Make sure teams understand the link between how quickly they respond to customers and how those customers feel about your company. Speedy email response times lead to happy customers. Happy customers lead to loyalty, retention and revenue.
🔘 Use data to reveal trends in how customers interact with your business. Then implement plans to capitalize on those trends.
🔘 Find bottlenecks and resolve them as quickly as possible. If there’s a team member or shared mailbox that is overwhelmed with customer queries, find ways to spread the work more evenly.
🔘 Continuously measure customer satisfaction with your service levels. Then use that feedback—and the data from your email performance optimization tool—to further enhance service levels.

6. Conclusion

Speedy customer service is essential to delivering a positive customer experience. And positive customer experiences lead to increased customer loyalty and retention.

Since email is still the number one channel for customer service, if you want to offer speedy customer service, you need to improve your email response time.

That’s why the top customer-facing teams use email performance optimization tools to unlock valuable data insights about their email response times, customer service trends, bottlenecks and more.

Start your journey to speedy email response times by leveraging timetoreply Optimizer. See how other companies use timetoreply Optimizer in their search for better customer experiences and speedy responses.