Why Email Response Time Is the Best Customer Service KPI
If your business is like most, you probably use email for internal and external communications in sales, marketing, and even customer service. So if you want higher profitability and customer satisfaction, email response time should be your new key performance indicator (KPI) to measure.
Email response time is how quickly your company responds to incoming emails. Depending on the context, this could apply to sales and lead generation, marketing, customer service, or other departments. The faster it is, the better, especially because according to an Adobe study, every day the average professional on average spends 5 hours and 52 minutes checking, reading, and writing emails. And this happens both inside and outside of work hours.
Why email response time should be your next KPI
Why is email response time so important?
Between 35 and 50% of sales go to the first responder. Research has found that 35 to 50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. Why? The first responder gets the first opportunity to make an impression, and that impression sticks. Responding quickly shows that you care about your customers, differentiating you from your competitors. It could be correlational, as the most competent businesses are likely to have streamlined protocols for responding to new inquiries.
In any case, improving your email response time can help you land more sales.
Responding within an hour increases success rate by 700%. Another study found that following up within an hour increases your success rate by 700%. Clearly, speed of response makes a strong and lasting impression on prospects. And this impression doesn’t just work in the context of sales; it works for customer service, too.
From an article by Shopify, "If there is one distinction to be made between companies who have loyal customers and those who struggle to retain customers, it would be the speed of customer service."
Lead qualification is 10 times lower after just five minutes. According to data published by The Harvard Business Review, waiting more than five minutes to respond to a lead can decrease your lead qualification success rate by 10 times. If you wait five to 10 minutes, you’ll see a 400% decrease. It's not always going to be possible to respond to incoming queries within five minutes, but if you can get to this echelon of email response time, the benefits can be enormous.
Response time is relevant to multiple departments. It's not just about sales. It's not just about marketing. It's not just about customer service. Email response time matters to almost every department within your organization, and it should be improved across the board. It can help you land more sales, make a better first impression, make prospects and customers happier, improve client retention, and boost team productivity as faster responses to emails enable your colleagues to work faster.
Customers value response time above all other customer service metrics. Another survey of customer care leaders and a group of IT professionals found that while service quality is very important, the speed of service still outweighs all other aspects of customer service. And a Dimensional Research/Zendesk study found that 69% of participants associated their good customer service experience with the quick resolution of their issue.
Measuring and improving email response time
So what strategies can you use to improve your team’s email response time?
1. Measure email response time using email tracking software
You can’t improve what you don’t measure, so start by using an email tracking software to measure this KPI. The Hawthorne effect is the tendency of people to change their behavior when they are aware of being observed. Use this to your advantage—simply measuring a KPI can lead to its marked improvement.
2. Send replies to acknowledge receipt of emails
If you can’t reply with a full answer right away, send a response that acknowledges receipt of the email, and let the person know that you’re working on getting them a full answer right away. This will still earn you the benefits of a fast response time, while buying you time to come up with the appropriate full answer.
3. Prioritize emails appropriately
Find a way to manage and distribute emails according to priority level and team availability. If you can distribute the workload appropriately, your team members will be in much better positions to respond immediately. You can automatically delegate emails in a shared inbox with a ticketing or shared inbox solution, or you can just order them by time stamp to address the oldest emails first.
4. Educate your reps
Most people have probably never thought about the benefits of fast response times in a business context. Educate them on the value of this metric, and you’ll see improvement.
5. Create templates and a knowledge base
Facilitate faster response times by creating templates and a knowledge base that all your reps can access at their leisure. This way, they won't have to craft novel responses from scratch with every incoming inquiry.
6. Use AI to help write responses
AI can help you write faster, answer questions (including from a knowledge base), or get started on a response that you can modify and send. Simply put, it saves you time writing. And that saved time means you can reply faster to emails.
Your company will benefit from a quicker email response time
Email response time deserves high status as a priority KPI within your organization. If you can improve email response time across all your internal departments, you'll win more sales, keep customers happier, and improve productivity at the same time.
