Mastering Outlook email analytics | timetoreply
With roughly 1.35 million companies in the US alone using Outlook, it’s not a stretch to say the Microsoft email client is an integral tool to many businesses. And leveraging Outlook email analytics can significantly boost productivity and streamline communication workflows for organizations of all sizes.
If you’re keen to access such data insights, then read on as we cover the following:
- Why do Outlook email analytics matter?
- A step-by-step guide to accessing Outlook’s productivity insights
- What if you want more analytics, more actionable insights?
Let’s go.
Why do Outlook email analytics matter?
Companies that handle large volumes of customer emails can benefit from tracking email analytics. You can use insights gleaned from the data to revolutionize your business productivity – both in terms of sales performance and customer service. This can be via email management and improved collaboration. With email analytics, you have access to valuable data that can:
- influence decision-making
- motivate team members
- identify weak points in the communication chain
- provide goals for teams to work towards
A step-by-step guide to getting productivity insights on Outlook
It’s easy to access Outlook’s native productivity insights via an add-in. All you need to do is either:
- Click the Viva Insights icon on the Outlook Home ribbon, or
- If you are using Outlook on the web, open an email message, click the ellipsis menu button (…), and click Viva Insights.
Unfortunately, with Microsoft Outlook, you don’t have access to key email analytics metrics that are necessary for a complete picture. However, you can still access productivity insights and features such as:
- After-hours impact
- Unread emails
- Adding or managing important people
- Focus time
- Task reminders
- Catch up on documents
What if you want more analytics, and more actionable insights?
As we said before, when it comes to gaining valuable insights into email productivity and performance, Outlook’s built-in email analytics capabilities fall short, leaving customer service and sales teams wanting more.
Outlook’s native functionality lacks the means to measure vital sales and customer service metrics such as:
🔵 Average email response time: Microsoft Outlook does not track average email response time. This is a vital metric that lets you know how long your team takes to respond to incoming emails, providing insights into your efficiency and responsiveness.
🔵 Busiest times and days: If you know your peak periods throughout the day and the most active days of the week, you can plan and manage workflow more effectively. Unfortunately, this is not available with Outlook alone.
🔵 Emails waiting for a reply: To effectively prioritize emails, you need to have a clear overview of emails awaiting a response, those marked as complete, and those nearing an SLA-defined reply time objective – something not found in Outlook.
🔵 SLA compliance: Do you know if you are meeting your agreed SLA targets? Not if you are using Outlook’s native analytics!
🔵 Individual and team performance: Wouldn’t having real data-driven insight into your teams’ email performance be great? This way, you could reallocate resources to ensure your team works optimally.
Since these crucial email analytics aren’t available via the Outlook add-in, many organizations are turning to Outlook email analytics software. What’s that? Outlook email analytics software is a specialist tool that you can use to:
- track average response times
- ensure important emails receive proper attention
- leverage data-driven insights to unveil critical trends and insights into your teams’ sales and customer service email management
- fostering ongoing improvements in efficiency and effectiveness
- and so much more
Essentially, with such a tool, organizations can make better decisions about where to invest time and money to ensure high levels of customer satisfaction and optimum sales conversion rates.
Accessing comprehensive Microsoft Outlook email analytics
There are several email analytics software tools available for teams working in Outlook. Choosing the best Outlook email analytics platform for your business depends on your specific needs, but here are a few key steps to follow.
Step 1: Choosing the right Outlook email analytics tool 🧐
A good way to narrow your search is to keep an eye out for those Outlook email analytics tools that have the following features:
- Easy visibility over emails that have been handled and emails still awaiting a reply.
- The ability to set and track custom SLAs based on your business and customers’ needs.
- The option to track shared mailboxes and individual team member stats to ensure all incoming emails receive a timely response.
- Powerful reporting capabilities that deliver insights into email productivity on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
- Real-time alerts to inform teams and individuals when an email is approaching a custom SLA threshold.
- The ability to integrate with third-party applications.
One such tool is the market-leading solution timetoreply. It turns all your Microsoft 365 data and Outlook email analytics into powerful live reports and intelligent recommendations to enable you to improve email performance.
Step 2: Integrate your chosen email analytics platform with Outlook ⚙️
Once you’ve chosen your email analytics platform, it’s time to implement it for your teams. Many email analytics solutions require some change management or integration processes to get them running at full speed.
What you want is a platform that integrates well with your existing email client software and requires no installation to immediately produce actionable insights into a broad range of email metrics. So, for example, timetoreply perfectly integrates with Outlook.
Step 3: Set and track custom SLAs ⚠️📥📤
One of the great advantages of using an email analytics platform for Outlook is the ability to set and track custom SLAs based on your business and customers’ needs.
Customer-facing teams using timetoreply can easily set SLAs, with the platform constantly tracking group and individual mailboxes to ensure every team member is working optimally toward achieving those precious KPIs. Another nifty feature is an email alert system that notifies relevant team members when an email approaches a custom SLA threshold. This keeps teams operating optimally and maintains the highest standards in customer service and sales efforts.
Step 4: Uncover trends and insights with reports📊
Daily, weekly, and monthly reports can help track the performance of customer-facing and sales teams and highlight areas for improvement, while real-time alerts and notifications ensure no important emails are left unanswered.
With timetoreply, companies can gain critical insights into the performance of their customer-facing and sales teams. Receive monthly reports that reveal important longer-term trends that may inform sales and customer service strategies. With rich data export capabilities, companies wishing to interrogate their email productivity data further or dive deeper into the inner workings of their customer-facing teams can do so easily and conveniently.
Access the full power of Outlook analytics with timetoreply
timetoreply’s email analytics software is one of the most advanced email analytics solutions available today. When using our specialist Email Analytics for Outlook and o365, you gain benefits that can transform your business.
Let’s take a look:
🚀Enhanced productivity🌟
timetoreply’s Outlook email analytics software provides valuable insights into email response times, helping users identify areas for improvement and optimize their productivity.
📊📈Performance tracking
By tracking and analyzing email metrics such as response rates, average reply times, and email volume, timetoreply enables users to monitor and measure their email performance accurately.
⏱️Time management
The software helps users identify time-consuming email threads and prioritize their responses accordingly, ensuring efficient time management and better workflow organization.
👥😄💬Customer engagement
With timetoreply’s analytics, users can better understand customer interactions, response patterns, and engagement levels, leading to improved customer satisfaction and relationships.
👥🤝Team collaboration
The email analytics software facilitates team collaboration by providing visibility into individual and team performance, enabling better coordination, accountability, and shared goals.
📊✅Data-driven decision-making
timetoreply’s Outlook email analytics software empowers users to make informed decisions based on real-time data, identify trends, and implement continuous improvement strategies.
🎯Benchmarking and goal setting
Users can compare their email response metrics against industry benchmarks, set performance goals, and track their progress over time to drive growth and achieve targets.
Choosing the best Outlook email analytics software
If you are searching for alternative solutions to fulfill your Outlook email analytics requirements, then consider trying timetoreply. With its user-friendly interface and seamless integration, timetoreply empowers customer service and sales teams with invaluable insights into their email productivity by tracking average time to respond, busiest times and days, emails waiting for a reply, SLA compliance and individual and team performance.
Book a demo and gain a competitive edge by unlocking the true potential of your Outlook experience with timetoreply.