5 Areas of Your Business Where Email Response Time Matters Critically
Here’s a shocking statistic in a 2018 Customer Service Benchmark Report on email response time conducted by SuperOffice:
“62% of companies ignore customer service emails.”
Surprising isn’t it?
More facts from the study:
“The average response time to handle a customer service request is 12 hours and 10 minutes!”
In this fiercely competitive age, we need not reiterate the obvious. The longer you take to respond to emails, the higher your chances of losing a customer, a sale, a lead, a meeting, potential talent and in some cases, your entire brand reputation.
It’s a no-brainer then for you and your team to take email response time seriously by measuring and analyzing the time it takes to respond to queries. While email response times affect every area of your business, it is critical for five major areas:
- sales
- customer success
- key account management
- customer service
- client services
Let’s see how slow email responses could disrupt business in these areas and what actions you can take to improve them.
1. Sales
Email response time affects sales processes the most. While you may think calling works best, research by HubSpot shows that “8 out of 10 prospects want to talk to sales reps via email over any other medium.”
When running an outreach campaign, immediate or close to immediate response time is literally the measure of success or failure of the campaign. Delaying or responding at an odd time without respecting the prospect’s time zone could also reflect badly on the professionalism of your business.
It’s quite obvious, but it’s often overlooked – if you don’t respond to a potential lead promptly, you will lose them to competitors.
2. Customer Success
In a world where the cost of customer acquisition has increased exponentially, businesses need more than just a record of customers. They need to invest in customer success – a process that aims to provide lifetime value to the customer and create a rich customer experience for all future engagements.
Interestingly, emails remain one of the most powerful mediums in a customer success process as you send them retention emails, post-signup emails, the incentive email, the support email and all the other emails that they need to read during their journey with you.
Of course, sending the email is just part of the process. Once you send the email, you MUST continue to deliver value by responding to the emails in time. Your customers want to talk to you, make it easier for them.
3. Key Account Management
An account manager is at the frontline and is responsible for ensuring their clients are getting value from their product or service. In fact, account managers are responsible for over 70% of a company’s revenue, which means if they don’t perform well with their client communication, they can be the reason a company loses a major client.
For account managers, responding to client emails impromptu is part of relationship building and problem-solving. An email response time tracker tool like timetoreply is instrumental in helping you recognize active account managers and measure their success with their customers. Good account managers have automated email processes, respond to customer queries and always find ways to provide them with the necessary solution.
4. Customer Support
We’ll keep it short here since this hardly needs to be elaborated – customer service email responses should not take more than 24 hours. This is not a goal. This is not an expectation. This is just basic business practice.
If your support staff is not responding to queries within 24 hours, you’ve got some major process redefining to do. Moreover, great customer service responds within an hour – which should be the goal of every business operating in today’s world of instantaneous communication. Timetoreply’s solution allows the account manager to not only gain visibility over their team’s email response times, but to them also set email response time goals and track their team’s performance against them. Nothing like a bit of healthy competition to keep everyone on their toes and eager to improve.
5. Client Services
Good client service equals a good brand reputation. Companies that deliver high client service see high customer retention and customer loyalty rates. Your client service department is responsible for ensuring that they earn the trust of the client, understand their pain points and responding to them in a way they choose and at a time that suits them.
A great client service team member will keep the client’s needs at the forefront and will resolve all their concerns promptly with the end goal being to develop a long-term relationship and gain a client’s trust as well as their loyalty.
How Can Time To Reply Help?
Our email tracking tool helps businesses track how quickly their sales, customer service, and client service staff are responding to emails. With timetoreply, you can:
- Measure staff and customer reply times on any email platform including Outlook, Office 365 (o365), Ms Exchange Server, IMAP, Gmail, Gsuite, Mimecast, Mac Mail, Yahoo.
- Track individual and group mailboxes
- Track web forms
- Set up email reply time goals for your team, or your company
- Report on email performance and behavior
In short, it does everything you need to help you improve sales and keep your customers happy. If you’re interested in boosting sales and improving your customer service, schedule your demo now.
