In order to effectively manage email for customer service you need to get a handle on the following metrics:
Email volumes (emails received, replies sent)
Number of emails awaiting a reply
Number of customer conversations that have been resolved (closed)
Your average reply times (first reply and overall reply times)
If you are using a shared mailbox for customer service, you need visibility into who is handling what workload onbehalf of the shared mailbox to manage workloads and for capacity planning purposes.
With these metrics at hand you’ll be able to improve your customer service teams’ responsiveness on email, resolve customer queries faster, manage workloads, address capacity planning, identify topics that come up often or that take long for your team to resolve.
By using timetoreply with Outlook Desktop, Outlook Online (o365) or Gmail, you’ll be able to get all of these metrics for your customer service teams.
In terms of how to set up your customer service mailboxes, we recommend using a shared mailbox and giving each member of the shared mailbox “send on behalf of” permissions. That means that they will be able to access the shared mailbox and reply from the shared mailbox and our system will be able to determine which team member replied, how many conversations they are handling, what they have marked as closed and calculate their average reply times.