How does EmailAnalytics calculate average response time?

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We have a few rules for how we calculate average response time:

  • If you receive an email but never respond to it, it will not count toward your average response time; only emails that you respond to are counted in the average.
  • If you receive an email outside of your designated work hours, and then reply to it within your designated work hours, we start counting response time from the time the next work-hour period begins (this rule only applies to work hours calculation).

Example: Your work hours are 8am to 5pm, Monday through Friday. You receive an email at 7am (outside your designated work hours) and reply to it at 8:05am (within your work hours). Response time (work hours) calculation: 5 minutes.

  • If you receive an email within work hours, then reply to it outside of your designated work hours, we stop counting the response time at the end of the most recent designated work hour period (this rule only applies to work hours calculation).

Example: Your work hours are 8am to 5pm, Monday through Friday. You receive an email at 4pm (within your designated work hours) and reply to it at 6:27pm (outside your work hours). Response time (work hours) calculation: 60 minutes (the time elapsed between when your email was received and the end of your scheduled work hours).

  • If you receive an email outside of work hours, then reply to it outside of your designated work hours (without any “work hours” time elapsing in the meantime), it will not be included in your “work hours” calculation. However, it will be included in your “actual” response time calculation.

Example: Your work hours are 8am to 5pm, Monday through Friday. You receive an email at 6pm (outside your designated work hours) and reply to it at 6:27pm. Response time (actual) calculation: 27 minutes (the actual time elapsed between when your email was received and when you responded to it). Response time (work hours) calculation: It is ignored because no time during work hours elapsed before the response was sent.

  • If you receive an email from someone, send a response, and then send another follow-up (ie, if you send 2 consecutive emails to the same person without receiving a response before the second email), we count your response time only for the first response you sent. In other words, the second email you sent is not counted in the response time average calculation.
  • If you receive 2 or more consecutive emails from the same person in the same thread, and then send a response, we calculate your response time from the most recent email received in the thread. In other words, we do not count the response time since the first email received; we calculate it from the most recent email received.
  • If you are a participant on an email thread (such as being cc’d) where other people are emailing, and then you send a response within the thread, we count your response time as the time elapsed between when you received the most recent email in the thread before replying to it, and the time of your response.
  • We only count responses that occur within the same email thread.

Example: Sally sends you an email in Thread A. You send Sally an email in thread B. We do not count this as a response, because the emails occurred in separate threads.

  • We do not count responses that occur after longer than 14 days.
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