One of the most significant impediments to effective email management is simply a lack of tools to monitor, report and analyze traffic flow into and out of team inboxes. Real-time visibility into team and agent performance is an important piece for robust email management, as even the best tools and techniques for streamlining mail flow are likely to be ineffective without instantaneous feedback. Real-time reporting on present email performance is a critical tool for positioning the necessary resources to manage the email load efficiently.
Dashboards are great for keeping the day-to-day operations on track, but historical data can prove just as important for identifying trends and areas to improve. That’s why Emailgistics also offers a range of reports for tracking and measuring historical user and team inbox performance. For new-hires you can measure their performance and track their improvement with daily, weekly and monthly reports.
To discourage agents from sitting on messages and replying at the end of the day, service level standards can be put in place that specify more aggressive reply time requirements. Regular reporting can then show how each agent is performing relative to the team’s service level goals.
Advice on Dashboards
When building your dashboard, it is essential to consider the following points, as a poorly implemented dashboard can be detrimental to your business.
It is important to choose email metrics that reveal bottlenecks or are otherwise critical in your workflow, as this will ensure your dashboard shows relevant and actionable data. When creating a dashboard, management should take time to carefully determine which metrics are the most appropriate for their business processes and email workflow.
Typical dashboard metrics might include the number of open messages (total email backlog), average email handling time, or average email age.
Dashboards drive action: reading an operational dashboard, it should be very clear what the current status of your team inbox is, and what actions (if any) should be taken to improve it. Consider making your most important metric the most prominent: for example, number of emails currently in danger of breaching your Service Level Agreement (SLA). Agents and managers can easily use this information to determine an appropriate time to schedule a break, or when more effort is needed to meet SLAs.
A well-crafted dashboard, to complement clear goals for agents, can not only significantly boost productivity, but also help you and your agents handle unexpected fluctuations in email volume. A dashboard gives agents immediate and constant insight into their own performance, which is helpful for both coaching and maintaining agent morale.
