ja_mageia

emailtopia Key Reporting Ratios
January 11th, 2010, Toronto, Canada

emailtopia offers a plethora of reports to help guide your business towards better email management practices. While the raw numbers in the reports are very useful, it's the ratios between these numbers that often yields the most useful insights.

Received to Net: Many of the group mailbox performance reports will tell you how many messages were received into a group mailbox, how many were moved (which always means to another group mailbox, not just assigned to a user), and what the net is. The net number represents the real work effort for that group mailbox. Comparing the Received to Net numbers gives you an idea of how many messages are making it to the correct mailbox from the outset. One of the goals of proficient email management is to route emails to the correct group mailbox and correct user as quickly as possible. Cutting down on manual intervention to handle re-routing will deliver huge productivity gains. Consider using rules to improve routing efficiencies, too. If spam is the cause of significant mail movement, ask the network administrator to review the settings of your upstream spam blocker to help reduce the amount of junk mail hitting Response Manager.

Initial Replies to Total Replies: Most user performance reports have columns for Initial Replies and Total Replies. This is important to help determine if a user is adhering to replying best practices. In most cases, a user should close a message after replying to it. Rarely does a user have to reply to the same message multiple times, so in general the ratio between Initial Replies and Total Replies should be pretty close to 1:1. If you see one user with a ratio closer to 1:2 or worse, and an average user reply time far better than most other users, then it's likely the user is sending out "manual acknowledgements". This happens when they send out a quick message to the customer saying "Got your message, I'll get back to shortly." Response Manager always uses the first reply to calculate the user's reply time for a message, so the user will show better than average reply times if they do this. Comparing the Initial to Total Replies columns gives you a tool to help uncover behavior patterns that may need to be addressed. It's very easy to set up incoming rules to create auto-replies so that customers know their communications are being handled by a professionally managed mail queue. Furthermore, rule-driven auto-replies do not count as replies when calculating reply times.

Peak Hourly Received to Peak Hourly Replied: When looking at the hourly volume reports, pay attention to the hours in which you receive most of your messages, compared to when most of the replies go out. Many businesses get a lot of their email in the morning. If you see that most of the replies are going out in the last hour of your work day, then there's a good chance that users are leaving emails until the end of the day and then rushing through them. While the work might be getting done, there's a good chance that the quality of those replies is suffering.

Closed Replied to Closed Not Replied: Not every message you receive requires a response. Sometimes, a customer is just sending in a final thank you at the end of an email conversation. Typically, these just get read and closed. The Daily Group Mailbox Reconciliation report includes information on how many messages were closed with and without replies. Usually, more messages are replied to and then closed than are closed with no reply. If you're seeing a different trend it may be worth investigating the cause. A common reason is that instead of moving junk emails to a different group mailbox (to be shred after reviewing), users are simply closing them. Not only does this keep the messages in the system, potentially affecting performance, it skews reports.

About emailtopia
Headquartered in Toronto, emailtopia is a leader in providing quality email solutions for global enterprises. The flagship product, Response Manager, is in use by such corporations as ING Direct, Omni Hotels, Broadway.com and Ingram Micro. To find out how Response Manager can help your company improve its customer service, contact info@emailtopia.com or visit www.emailtopia.com.

For more information please call:
Paul King, emailtopia
416-239-4826 x242
paul@emailtopia.com