HR Covered improved their customer service team’s email response time by 70% after deploying EmailAnalytics, improving their CSAT score from 7.9 to 8.6.

The following case study was conducted in interview format with Shawn Brown, Chief Operating Officer at HR Covered.

HR Covered is a Canadian-based HR consulting firm that specializes in helping small businesses and not for profit organizations handle HR compliance and get ROI on their people and HR processes. They provide a service that protects clients against liability and gives them a solid HR foundation to allow them to grow.

• Industry: HR Consulting
• Company size: 70+ employees

What was the challenge you faced that brought you to EmailAnalytics?

We run quarterly CSAT surveys with our clients and a common theme we were seeing a lot of was…”everything is great, but responses are a little slow” or “All is good, but I wish I could get an answer quicker.” As a lot of our customer requests come in via email we needed an effective and simple way to track the efficiency and effectiveness of our email responses. Without a system in place we had no true way of knowing if our customers were getting the responses they needed in a timely fashion.

What made you decide to give EmailAnalytics a try?

We looked at a lot of different options and EmailAnalytics stood out because it was focused solely on the problem we were trying to solve. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of some of the other platforms which makes it simple to stay focused and measure the metrics that are most important to us.

How do you use EmailAnalytics to solve that problem?

We initially started with a benchmark of where the team was at in terms of response rates and times. We set a quarterly target for the team and measured the progress weekly.

Our service team improved their response times by 70% over the quarter, and our CSAT score increased from 7.9 to 8.6.

How has EmailAnalytics provided value for you?

It’s given us a way to clearly measure our response times and show the team how they can improve and what the impact of those improvements are. It took an unknown in our business, provided a current benchmark in terms of where we were at and allowed us to build a process to improve.

Do your reps know their inboxes are being tracked? If so, how do they feel about it?

Yes, we believe in transparency so we were very upfront about getting their buy-in on the program. If they’re not aware of where they are at and how to improve it it wouldn’t make sense to implement a system like this in the first place.

Did you have any reservations/worries about how your team might react to having their inboxes tracked? Did those concerns come to fruition, or was it a non-issue?

Of course we were concerned that the team would think that they were being “Big Brothered” and they had some apprehensions at first. The most crucial part of the communication was that it was strictly for the sake of improving our service which they are all on board with. I showed them what I could see and what we were looking at. This removed any concerns that existed when we introduced it. They knew we weren’t looking at their emails, just how we provide better service.

Do your reps have access to their own stats, or just their managers?

We made it optional to get the reports from EmailAnalytics and some took us up on that offer. We did do our own internal reporting by rep and communicated it weekly to the team so they could see where they are at in comparison to everyone else.

Do you plan to use EmailAnalytics in other departments?

We just started with the sales team. We want to measure our sales effectiveness:

• How many emails do our Account Executives get a day?
• How long does it take for them to get back to their prospects?
• Are they missing emails that could potentially cost us sales?