If you want your team to understand where their time is being spent and discover actionable ways to improve customer email management, you need a great customer email management tool like timetoreply.
Email is still the most used customer service channel. Therefore it’s vital that you optimize how your team uses email to engage with existing customers, as well as incoming sales leads.
In this post, I’ll show you how you can benefit from a customer email management tool. We’ll look at the key benefits of using timetoreply and how you can get set up with it in minutes.
Let’s dive right in.
What is a Customer Email Management Tool?
Customer email management tools help you manage incoming emails from your customers and sales leads.
Effective email management will help your team avoid email overload, focus on emails that matter most, and use their time more effectively.
How timetoreply Can Help You with Customer Email Management
1. Identify priority emails
If you have a large customer base or are keeping in contact with sales leads using email, then timetoreply’s real-time alerts can help.
Real-time alerts allow you to create customizable alerts for incoming priority emails.
You’ll see important emails as soon as they arrive, and won’t need to check your inbox every five minutes when you’re waiting for an important email from a customer or high-value sales lead.
You can stay focused on other important tasks throughout the day, only checking your inbox when there’s a good reason to.
Therefore, it’s a simple, effective way to stay on top of the emails that matter most for your work without letting them become a significant source of distraction.
2. Track how long it takes to close support conversations
When an email conversation is finished, timetoreply allows your team to close it. This means your team won’t have an inbox full of emails they’ve already replied to, but that is still stealing attention.
Instead, they can focus on the next important task on their to-do list and be confident knowing they’re on top of their work for the day.
Tracking your average time-to-close will help you find ways to effectively remove blockers getting in the way of your support agents resolving customer queries.
When new support emails come in, it’ll be instantly clear what they need to focus on next.
Improving time-to-close will improve your customer service team’s productivity and ensure they’re focused on successfully resolving every query that lands in the support inbox.
3. Improve customer relationships
A good email management tool will have benefits across your whole business.
One of our favourite benefits is that your customers and sales leads will always receive a reply within a defined time frame.
You can set reply time goals for your team. For example: reply to all customer service emails within 12 hours.
Then, you can gather insights on how your support team is performing compared to their goals.
Effective communication with your existing customers is a powerful way to gain a competitive advantage and leave your customers satisfied with every interaction.
Consider the fact that 7 in 10 customers say they’ll spend more with a company that has excellent customer service. It follows then that it’s vital that you invest in keeping your customers happy and satisfied with your customer experience.
Using timetoreply you can take a data-driven approach to your customer email management, providing your team with the insights they need to improve their communication.
4. Never miss a sales lead
As your company grows, you’ll miss opportunities.
Perhaps you didn’t reply to an inbound lead fast enough, or maybe you didn’t follow-up as quickly to a post-demo email with crucial questions that someone sent you.
Mistakes happen — but you should be doing everything in your power to provide your leads with a sales experience that makes them want to become a customer.
If you don’t reply quickly, your competitors will.
Studies have found that 78% of sales go to the first vendor to reply to a lead. So, it’s vital you don’t let your email reply times slip.
Using a customer email management tool like timetoreply, you can set clear goals around your reply time, see how well you’re performing, and find ways to improve.
Not only will you get more sales, but it’s good manners!
So then, if you know that you need a customer email management tool, what are the next steps?
Connecting a Customer Email Management Tool to your inbox
timetoreply Overview Report of Average Reply Times
Next, you’ll need to connect your email management tool to your inbox.
timetoreply connects seamlessly to o365, Outlook, Gmail, or any other IMAP mailbox.
Our software works on top of your inbox — we’ll never have access to your email contents, only metadata that allows us to track when you send and receive emails. Your privacy is always protected.
Once you connect your inbox, your data will start populating within minutes. You’ll have stats on:
- Average first reply time
- Overall time to reply
- Total emails sent and received
- And much more.
It’s the ideal way to give your support and sales teams data on their email performance to help them find actionable ways to improve.
You don’t need to spend all day digging through data to find actionable insights, either. As an admin user, you’ll receive a once-a-day snapshot of all email activity across your company, with easily digestible stats, broken down by inbox.
This means you can compare reply time performance between teams, individuals, and internal vs. external emails. There is no need to install any software for timetoreply to start tracking your response times, and you can get started in minutes.