Campaign Monitor states that, according to experts, the average person sends and receives 121 business emails per day. That’s a lot of messages to juggle, and it’s no wonder that many of them go unanswered. But as any e-commerce business knows, responding promptly to emails is now a vital part of the customer experience. Customers, meanwhile, have email response time expectations.

So, how can e-commerce businesses meet the customer's standards? In this article, we'll walk through the following:

• What email response times customers expect
• And how your business can optimize your response times and match those expectations

What Is the Expected Response Time to a Customer Email?

An email response time customers would consider "fast enough" will depend on various factors. These could include the urgency of their concerns or your promised response time - which could be indicated on your support page for instance. It can also be influenced by your customers' experiences with other responses or your internal response time goals.

Here are some industry stats:

• Netomi found that almost 56% of companies that respond to emails do so within 12 hours and 46% reply within 6 hours. E-commerce companies, on the other hand, respond within an average of 11.5 hours - which is the fastest.
• A joint survey by SuperOffice and Toister Performance Solutions, meanwhile, found that responding within an hour will meet the expectations of 88% of consumers. It also adds that some find a 24-hour email rule okay, but 31.2% of them would prefer a reply in an hour or less.
• HubSpot Research indicates that 90% of customers rate an "immediate" response to their customer service question as either "important" or "very important", with 60% of customers defining "immediate" as 10 minutes or less.

In short, a good rule of thumb is to reply to customers at least within 24 hours. If you can reply the same day as their response, even better. And if you could reply within 4 hours, that would be the crème de la crème. 

With US-Based Chatdesk CX Experts, you can reduce your response times starting at $99/month.

How to Meet Expected Email Response Times: Best Practices

1. Set goals and keep your team on track.

Set a realistic, yet measurable, standard response time and make sure everyone on your team is aligned. Here are steps to take to get everyone on the same page:

• Set up a meeting to go over your team targets. Include data on what your current response time is and then individual targets. Offer your team insights into which inquiries are taking up the most time and ways to cut that down.
• Share weekly performance reports & set up monthly/quarterly meetings to go over the results.

2. Create response templates.

At minimum, you’ll need to create templates for your most common customer inquiries. Those usually include:

• Issuing refunds
• Shipping Delays
• Responding to Negative Comments & Feedback
• Out of Stock Items

This will save your team members time in figuring out how to craft the message versus finding the solution. All those templates can be found here: 24 Free Customer Response Templates for CX Teams 

Download Now: Respond faster to your customers with 24 free, customizable templates.

‍3. Identify Bottlenecks

To be efficient with your time, it’s better to resolve issues affecting the team first versus individuals since that will have the most impact. 

Team-wide Issues

Here are a few examples to help identify what's troubling your support team:

• Did a busy queue lead to missed emails? If your team is overwhelmed by the number of emails they receive, setting expected response times may not be enough. Achieving them may require other solutions like optimizing your process or hiring more people.
• Is it clear which team members are responsible for specific concerns? For instance, when separate emails - such as one asking for tech support and another asking about refunds - come in, are they being delegated properly?
• Are the team's tools sufficient and intuitive? Poorly-designed and unintuitive tools can cause your team to spend more time than necessary navigating the system. If you’re stuck in an annual contract with a vendor, try developing a playbook that addresses how to find information for the most common customer inquiries. 

Concerns Involving Individual Members

As for individual support team members, the biggest bottleneck is usually experience. Additional training or having an accessible knowledge base can solve this. Also have team members be able to shadow high-performing customer support agents so they can learn in real-time too.

4. Show customer impact.

How to Measure Email Response Times

Before you can try the above tips for improving your email response times, however, you will need the ability to measure them. Typically, you have to record the time that passes between the moment a customer sends your support team an email and when a response is sent back. But with all the messages your staff will be handling, third-party tools will be required to see concrete metrics.

Here are a couple of solutions that can help:

• Intercom, a customer communications platform, lets you view your median response times
• XCALLY, an on-premise and cloud-based contact center solution offers analytics and reporting for your email channels.

The above tools are among Chatdesk's integrations, allowing our clients who use them to access email response time metrics which can be used for benchmarking.

Hire On-Demand CX Experts to Meet Email Response Time Expectations

We’re Chatdesk, the CX experts helping innovative companies supercharge sales through their social and support channels. Our US-based teams deliver perfectly on-brand responses that turn customer inquiries on social, email, and chat into 10% more conversions and higher customer satisfaction. 

Need some help? We’re at your service at Chatdesk.com. Schedule a free demo with us today.