Outlook email analytics tools for customer and sales teams

As the world’s most popular business email platform, Microsoft Outlook is invaluable to companies of all sizes and in every global market.

Millions of companies depend on Outlook as a vital productivity and customer-facing tool, driving their sales and customer service success via Microsoft’s popular platform.
How do you improve on such a vital solution? With analytics.

By tracking and measuring key email productivity metrics – email response times, email traffic per day and per user or group, highest-traffic times per day – companies can make accurate decisions over where to invest more time and resources to ensure every customer is satisfied and every sales prospect converts.

But how to decide which Outlook email analytics solution is best for your needs?

In this guide, we’ll take a more in-depth look at the importance of an Outlook email analytics solution and analyze and compare some of the leading solutions on the market, including Front, MyAnalytics and our own solution timetoreply.

Read on for helpful insights and guidance on which solution would best serve the needs of your business.

Key features to look for in your Outlook email analytics tool

Not all Outlook email analytics tools are created equal. Depending on your business needs, certain products or features may provide greater value to you and your teams.

However, there are some common features that all great Outlook email analytics solutions will have, namely to help you to:

• easily see which emails need a reply and which have already been handled
• track email volumes per individual, team or shared mailbox
• create real-time alerts so emails from important or priority customers are not left unanswered for too long
• track shared mailboxes and individual team member stats to ensure the team members meant to respond to shared mailbox queries do so in a timely manner
• optimize average email reply times to help you improve customer satisfaction and boost sales success
• forego a standalone ticketing system by closing email threads directly from Outlook and get access to stats regarding the ‘time to complete‘ for each mailbox
• download and schedule reports

Read on to see which Outlook email analytics solution will best suit your business.

3 Best Outlook Email Analytics Software Solutions in 2023

1. timetoreply – The best business email analytics software for Outlook

For companies seeking a powerful and easy-to-integrate email analytics tool for their teams working in the Outlook email environment, timetoreply offers a market-leading solution that can immediately boost your sales and customer service success.

Contrary to many other Outlook email analytics solutions, timetoreply requires no installations and can start producing actionable insights within minutes of activation.

Our user-friendly solution allows companies to add individual or team mailboxes and can track an entire company domain to give unprecedented transparency into email productivity.

Actionable intelligence enables team leaders to improve their team’s average reply times, boosting sales success and improve customer satisfaction.

With timetoreply, no important emails will slip through the cracks, and a powerful dashboard provides a real-time view over the total email performance of your customer-facing and sales teams.

Our ISO27001 certification and adherence to a broad range of global data and privacy regulations, you can rest assured that your email activities always remain compliant.

Key features

timetoreply offers companies and their teams an unbeatable suite of functionality and benefits to help them better measure their email performance and gain actionable intelligence into areas of improvement.

timetoreply’s Outlook email analytics solution supercharges your Outlook email activities by enabling you to:

• see exactly how many emails you need to reply to and how long each email has been awaiting a reply
• track total business email volumes
• close email conversations from your inbox without the need for a separate ticketing system
• track average email reply times and make improvements in the speed at which your team replies
• optimize your email communications with actionable reports, proactive alerts and improved email response times
• gain granular detail into shared or team mailboxes including:
  • total conversations
  • internal conversations
  • inbound and outbound conversations
  • conversations with replies
  • completion ratio
  • average first reply time
  • average overall reply time
  • domain or SLA reporting that tracks how well your team is responding to emails from a specific domain

Pricing

timetoreply offers affordable and convenient pricing options to suit the needs of teams of any size, with monthly or discounted annual payment options.

Looking for the best email analytics solution for Microsoft and Googe? Schedule a demo now

For smaller companies with five to ten customer-facing team members, the Starter package will enable them to get started with:

• Core email analytics
• 4 report types
• dashboard access for one user
• 3 scheduled reports
• alerts (20 per mailbox per month)
• Data export to PDF
• Cost of $16 per mailbox per month

For larger teams of more than ten people that want access to enhanced reporting capabilities and convenient data export, the Pro package is ideal. Our Pro package offers all the benefits of the Starter package, as well as:

• An additional 6 report types (for a total of 10)
• An additional 4 users with dashboard access (for a total of 5)
• An additional 17 scheduled reports (for a total of 20)
• An additional 30 alerts per mailbox per month (for a total of 50)
• Team level reporting
• Shared and team mailboxes
• Leave management
• Data export to CSV/Excel
• Cost of $25 per mailbox per month

For large or growing teams, our Elite package offers the full suite of timetoreply functionality as well as access to BI tools via our API. Elite users have access to all the Pro functionality as well as:

• An additional 45 dashboard users (for a total of 50)
• An additional 40 scheduled reports (for a total of 60)
• An additional 50 alerts per mailbox per month (for a total of 100)
• API access with virtually unlimited API calls
• Cost of $34 per mailbox per month

In addition, an Enterprise package is available for teams of at least 50 mailboxes, with a comprehensive enterprise support plan that includes 24-hour support, SLA guarantees, customization and onboarding and training support.

Related: See how Email Analytics compares to Timetoreply here

2. Front

Front is a full platform that combines your company emails, apps and teammates into a single view. This enables companies to communicate more effectively with customers, while custom automated workflows help companies drive greater internal efficiencies.

Front stores all emails in a single place accessible by all team members, so teammates can be quickly notified if their input is needed.

The solution prizes collaboration through a single shared inbox and works best for companies that want to connect all their inboxes, SMS and social accounts.

Front is like timetoreply in that it measures email response times and tracks trends in customer communication. It empowers companies with powerful analytics into the email performance of their customer-facing support teams.

However, the solution was not designed for sales teams and lacks the data-driven insights and productivity improvements that other competitors such as timetoreply offer.

Key features

• Able to scale with any team, from 5 to 5000 users
• Measures email response times
• Analytics that reveal trends in customer communication and team workloads
• Ideal for teams working off a shared inbox
• Encourages real-time collaboration to reduce bottlenecks
• Allows for automated custom workflows that free teams up to focus on keeping customers happy
• Secure with industry-standard encryption
• Compliant to GDPR, SOC 2 and other governance requirements
• Integration with 100+ apps
• Offers open APIs for further customization

What Front is missing

One of Front’s most apparent shortcomings is its lack of support for sales teams. 

For companies that use email as a primary communication channel for sales engagements, Front simply does not provide sufficient support.

Front also requires that all email communication moves to its platform which is not to everyone’s taste.

Significant change management is also required to ensure users can effectively use the platform for their customer-facing communications.

Related: See how Front compares to Timetoreply here

3. MyAnalytics

Microsoft MyAnalytics is an application that helps teams gain insight into how employees spend their time on email with the aim of making productivity improvements.

MyAnalytics can track a broad range of useful data points, including email productivity, time spent in meetings, and specific insights into teams’ Outlook email inboxes.

The solution offers reports and dashboards based on the productivity of specific workers or teams. This data can be integrated with other HR and performance management tools to optimize team productivity.

MyAnalytics does not collect any additional data on user habits, and instead uses readily available calendar and email data to produce insights.

As a Microsoft solution that is integrated with the broader Office suite of applications, MyAnalytics can produce productivity insights for solutions such as Teams, Skype for Business, OneDrive and SharePoint, which distinguishes it from other competitors.

Key features

• Dashboard that shows statistics on user work patterns over past month
• Ability to see how users are spending time between work meetings, emails, focus hours and after-hours work
• Visibility into each user’s top collaborators
• Easy configuration of which data points to track to produce personalized data insights
• Ability to integrate other Microsoft apps such as Teams, Skype for Business, OneDrive and SharePoint
• Add-in for Outlook that facilitates capturing of emails used to generate reports
• Automatic installation/integration with Office upon purchase of MyAnalytics plan

What MyAnalytics is missing

Most of the concerns over MyAnalytics are centred on its tracking of employees across their business productivity apps.

The rise of so-called workplace surveillance apps following the switch to remote work during the early parts of the pandemic has also contributed to concerns over how organizations could use insights on individual team member’s productivity.

MyAnalytics is also designed for the Microsoft 365 suite of applications so companies working on other business productivity suites will have to seek another solution.

The solution’s focus is designed for driving internal productivity and is not specifically tailored to support customer-facing or sales teams, so lacks the focused support that solutions such as timetoreply offer.

The best Outlook email analytics tool (a recap)

So which Outlook email analytics tool is best suited to your business needs?

If you are all-in on the Microsoft 365 business productivity suite and don’t specifically need your analytics to provide insight into your customer service and sales efforts, MyAnalytics could be a good option.

Bear in mind, however, growing concerns over privacy and perceived workplace surveillance, which may have unintended negative consequences for your productivity.

If you are looking specifically for a solution to unify your customer service capabilities on a single platform and don’t mind moving all your team’s email activity into a shared mailbox, Front is a great option.

If you need a secure, easy-to-use and quick-to-deploy Outlook email analytics solution that can supercharge your sales and customer-facing support teams, then timetoreply is the best option on the market.

timetoreply’s quick deployment and ability to produce insights without invading user privacy ensure you get the insights you need quickly and while adhering to the highest standards of security and privacy.

Gain quick, actionable intelligence into the performance of your sales and customer service teams with timetoreply.

Schedule a demo now and see how our data-driven insights can help you drive productivity, improve customer satisfaction and enhance sales success.

All you need to do is enable timetoreply and within minutes you can start receiving insights into your team’s email activity on Microsoft Outlook. Requiring no software installation, timetoreply tracks individual or shared mailboxes and produces actionable insights via a dashboard as well as scheduled daily, weekly or month reports.

An email tracking tool simply produces insights into the success of emails sent and received based on a predetermined set of metrics.

An email business analytics tool produces data insights across a broad range of metrics that teams and companies can apply to improve productivity, remove bottlenecks, improve the accuracy, relevance and speed of replies, and address shortcomings in how sales and customer service teams operate on email.

The best Outlook email analytics tool is timetoreply, thanks to its ability to work with all Outlook and Office 365 email clients and high levels of data privacy and security. timetoreply also does not read the contents of emails and simply tracks useful data in email headers that help teams identify areas of improvement in how they engage with customers, prospects and teammates via email.