To provide excellent customer support, businesses need to track the time it takes to resolve customer issues. This metric is a crucial indicator of how efficiently your customer support team is working and how satisfied your customers are with the support they’re receiving. We’ll discuss the time to resolution metric, why it’s essential, and how you can track it effectively.
What is time to resolution?
Response time is often confused with time to resolution. Although response times (also known as reply times) help calculate the time to resolve, they are not the same. Response time elapsed once a message arrived and how long it takes to respond to the inquiry. In short, time to resolution is the time it takes from when a customer first contacts customer service to when the problem is resolved, including all attempts to fix the problem, not just the first.
Why should you care?
It takes time to resolve a customer service issue is crucial for customer satisfaction. A recent study found that the time it took to fix a problem was the most critical factor in customer loyalty. Customers who had good experiences with customer service were more likely to recommend the company and be loyal customers than those who received an excellent product or service quality. The study also found that the time it took to resolve an issue was more important than price in customer loyalty. In other words, customers are more likely to be loyal to a company that offers good customer service. Therefore by improving the time to resolution metric, you’re taking steps to ensure that your customers are more likely to stick around for the long hall.
How do you calculate time to resolution?
Before we get into our tips on improving the metric, let’s determine how you can calculate time to resolution (don’t worry, very little math is needed). Keep in mind that there are a variety of factors to take into consideration when determining this metric. These factors can include the severity of the issue, the resources available to the team, and the team’s ability to work efficiently. However, some general guidelines can help.
For individual team members’ metrics, calculate the time elapsed from when a message arrives to when the matter is resolved. Repeat this process for each incoming customer message and add up the total time. Lastly, divide the total by the number of customer messages received that day.
For example, let’s say you received six customer emails. You managed to tally up the total time spent responding to messages to 38 minutes (8+12+3+5+4+6). Now we divide 38 by 6, making the average time to resolution 6.3 minutes. Voila! Now we have calculated the time to resolution average.
How to improve time to resolution
One of the most crucial steps to improving your team’s time to resolution ratio is ensuring your team is well equipped. By training and continuously checking in on your team, you can begin to prepare team members on how to overcome certain time-sucking hurdles.
As previously mentioned, there are various factors determining what is impacting your current metric. Using a solution like Emailgistics can help prevent a handful of these hurdles.
SLA Alerts
If your team is struggling to respond to messages, Emailgistics offers alerts. Per your Service Level Agreement (SLA), Emailgistics notifies users when a message is close to breaching the SLA. Never worry about an email sitting for too long ever again.
Automated Email Distribution
Another issue many teams face is the distribution of incoming customer emails. Our solution allows team members to set their work schedules (including breaks and lunch breaks) to signify they are available to take on incoming emails. Our auto distribution also accounts for custom rules. For example, a user chooses a keyword such as “billing” to route a message to a specific team member automatically. Moreover, users can set a max number of emails sent to their folder to prevent being overloaded with emails. You can rest assured that no email will slip through the cracks with the auto distribution.
Conversation History
Emailgistics generates a conversation ID for every incoming message. Users can use the ID to track the conversation history of a customer message. For example, users can track when an email was received by a team member and when the user resolved the issue.
Real-Time Metrics
Although Emailgistics does not account for time to resolution metrics, it does, however, show other vital metrics in real-time. For example, managers can check team members’ average reply time and the number of assigned messages. Our Dashboard is customizable, so users can see the metrics they care about most at any point in time. It should also be noted that reports can also be generated and exported. Therefore allows you to get insight into your team’s performance.
Although there are many methods to manually improve your time to resolution, save yourself the headache and try Emailgistics. Get your free 14-day trial to strengthen your team’s workflow. Click here to learn more about how Emailgistics can help your team improve workflow and customer satisfaction.
