What is the average email response time

Our reports documentation at Help Scout details how response time is defined , including some of the edge cases like a customer emailing in twice before the first response can be sent.

Many systems will break out first response time as a separate metric, which looks only at the waiting period between the first customer message in a conversation and the first reply. We reviewed public numbers on customer expectations for response times and found they covered a wide range. Your customers will not behave identically to any other customers, but these may be useful guideposts. This joint survey reveals that the recommended time of response is one hour.

Responding in an hour will meet the expectations of 88 percent of consumers surveyed. Read the full report. Instead, review your own reports for baseline measurements to work with.

Then focus on one thing you can change, like reducing response times during certain hours or for specific customer types, and compare the results to those baselines. How do you go about responding to customers more quickly? We think of it in three steps: Understand what you are trying to achieve, understand the opportunities to improve speed, and implement a plan.

Before taking any action to increase the speed of your email responses, take a moment to formulate a clear goal. A goal like that is harder to game because a speedy but unhelpful or plain wrong answer would not qualify.

When a customer sends you a request for help, they may never have dealt with your support team before and may have had poor service experiences with other companies. So your first reply time matters more than any response time, and that is reflected in the correlation between customer satisfaction rates and response times. Getting a fast, solid, helpful first reply back builds their confidence in your team and your product, and it creates a positive impression that you can reinforce over the rest of the conversation.

When you have already been responsive and helpful earlier in the conversation, your customer will be more understanding about needing to wait for you to get them answers later on. Speed targets need to be matched with a clear quality standard and the service interaction judged as a whole. Browse your closed conversations, and take a look at the time they were received and the time the first reply was sent.

Where was the time spent during that window? Sometimes it will be clear, and in other cases you may need to speak to team members or use your own experience to judge. Here are some of the common ways that time is spent while a customer is waiting for a reply, and some tips for addressing them:. Sometimes delays are not systemic, but can instead be attributed to individual skill levels or behaviors.

When deciding how to bring down your response times, look at the issues which are eating up the most time, as well as the issues which are easiest to resolve for your team. If the support team can show that they are already reducing response times with internal changes, they are in a stronger position to ask for help from other teams on the bigger projects.

For example, a fast response time might be vital when:. In other cases, speed is less important, and rushing to get an answer out might not improve the overall experience at all. Your energy could be better spent elsewhere.

One final option to consider for reducing your response times is better self-service options. If your customers can solve their own problems via your conveniently located knowledge base without ever having to ask you for help, that might be the best experience of all. Different customers have different requirements, and focusing on speed to the exclusion of other improvements can have diminishing returns. However, timely, responsive customer service is central to delivering quality customer experiences.

After running a support team for years, Mat joined the marketing team at Help Scout, where we make excellent customer service achievable for companies of all sizes. Connect with him on Twitter and LinkedIn. So how can you measure email response time for yourself or your employees? Read on for the answers to these questions, as well as how to implement response time tracking for your team.

A good email response time etiquette would be to never go more than 24 hours without answering an email if you can help it, and strive to respond to email within an hour or two if you can. There are a few ways to look at the normal email response time, across the board.

You can find the latest one here. Those figures include weekends and holidays. So what if we remove all weekends and holidays from our calculations?

How does that change things? The methodology of our study is outlined in the report itself, but the important thing to know is that we removed all gmail. The researchers noted that while it was possible to analyze millions of emails, there were some considering factors that would significantly skew the results. For example, a large proportion of replies sent within the first few minutes of receiving an email were likely due to auto-responders.

Accordingly, they only looked at messages that received replies after five minutes had elapsed, but before two weeks had elapsed, leaving them with , messages.

Overall, they found that the average response time for a business email is One study from SuperOffice , a CRM platform, looked at company response times to emails from customers. They found the fastest response time to be a minute clearly the outlier of the group , with the slowest response time being 8 days. The average was 12 hours and 10 minutes , putting it within striking distance of our own study. We also have to consider the average response time to a form submission by your sales staff, as fast replies tend to lead to much higher conversion rates.

One study by Drift found that only 7 percent of companies responded to a new form completion within 5 minutes, and more than half of companies 55 percent in the group failed to respond within the first 5 days. The point: Proper email response time expectations are difficult to nail down.

Studies show ranges from around 2 to 17 hours, though they involve different industries. As you can see from the graph below, businesses across all industries except Corporate Travel — which is an outlier for all the wrong reasons take roughly hours to get back to inquiries made by email. Responding to emails quickly should be more than a company goal it should be a standard of practice. So… how do you measure up? The template we use to make sure our team understands how quickly they need to respond to email.

Follow these five steps and you'll get visibility into your teams' email performance, understand your current response times and email volumes, be able to set KPIs, identify areas for improvement, set alerts to ensure nothing slips through the cracks and more!

Download the free Response Time Policy template and start putting a framework in place to improve your response time to customers. Shared mailboxes can be a nightmare. But follow these five ways to make managing collaborative email easier and more transparent and you can make sure that your shared inbox is transformed into a tool for your team's best work.

Get Your Standard Email Response Time Policy Template Download this standard email response policy document to ensure consistent reply times across your team. Get the template! Download for free. Try timetoreply for free Get an instant report on your team's email reply times and volumes. Start free trial. Get the guide now!