Time. It’s the one commodity you can’t get more of.
We live in a world where consumers and businesses alike are becoming less and less forgiving of anything that wastes it – and rightly so.

The data backs this up. Companies that respond to emails within 5 minutes are 7x as likely to qualify leads.
Consumers expect to receive a response within four hours and most businesses don’t even hit this benchmark on average. In today’s hyper-competitive marketplace then. Something as simple as responding to emails quickly is an opportunity to shine.

The key to improving anything is measurement. How else would you know if you’re improving? So, in this article, we’re going to look at:

How to measure email response times in Microsoft Outlook with timetoreply

1. Work with your Averages

Amongst the huge number of email response metrics available to timetoreply users, one of the most important is the ‘average reply time’. We don’t just give you one time here, we give you two.

The first is ‘Average Initial Reply Time’ which is the average time it takes your business to reply to the first email in a conversation – i.e a new lead or potential client. Arguably this is the most important metric when it comes to measuring response times as these senders have no existing commitment to the correspondence and will be willing to go elsewhere with only minimal incentive or motivation.

The second reply time average we give you is the Overall Reply Time. This takes into account all emails (initial and replies) to give you a broader view of how your teams are performing.

Both of these metrics should be as quick as you can get them but our system enables you to prioritize those all-important initial emails. Potentially sales inquiries.

Our reporting goes another step further too. Breaking down the time into working and non-working hours. Giving you precise insight into your business’ response times.

2. Segment

Like most businesses, you probably have multiple teams within your company. And, they probably all use email.

So how can you be sure your average scores are accurate? What if one team is razor-sharp at responding and another as blunt as a wooden stick? How would you know?

Using timetoreply together with Microsoft Outlook, it’s easy to filter your average response time by the email address of an individual, a team, or even inquiries via web forms vs direct emails.
Segmentation doesn’t start and end at your staff’s performance though. It’s even possible to segment the response times themselves.
TTR will tell you what percentage of responses came within specific times. For example, want to know what percentage of your emails were responded to within that holy grail of 5 minutes? No problem. Our reporting system does that with ease.

3. Monitoring Progress

Once you have systems in place to ensure emails are being acted on quickly and effectively. You’ll want to make sure you can see improvements throughout your business over time.

There’s nothing more helpful when it comes to measuring data than a nice, visual graph. Our software will report directly on how your company’s Outlook users have performed over any given time period.
Mapping out the average reply time on a day-to-day scale – which gives you a clear representation of progression at a glance.

Summary

There you have it, the easy way to measure response time in Outlook.
timetoreply will give you a clear and simple method of measuring the performance of your business when it comes to responding to emails in a timely manner.
Stopping you from leaving leads frustrated and revenue on the table.

To see everything you’ve just read in action, why not try our free 15 day trial or watch our quick demo video?