Why the start of a new year is the right time to fix your email workflow
Most customer-facing teams enter a new year with the same visibility problems they had the year before. They do not know whether workload is distributed fairly. They find out about SLA breaches from client complaints. Their shared inboxes are a black box. And the clients most at risk of churning are invisible until they send a cancellation email.
None of this has to be the case. The data to answer all of these questions already exists in your team's email account. Email Meter makes it visible.
This session, the first in Email Meter's 2026 webinar series, walks through six ways to get full control over your team's email workflow, illustrated with a real case study from Avery Dennison.
The Avery Dennison case study
Avery Dennison came to Email Meter with a problem that most customer-facing teams will recognise. They felt they were neglecting customers, but they did not have the data to know where the problem was, how bad it was, or who within the team needed support.
As Laurence explained: "They felt that what they don't know, they don't know. So they wanted insights into how busy the team was, how well they were responding to things, but also just to investigate what their workflows looked like."
Within a few months of implementing Email Meter, Avery Dennison had achieved measurable results across three key metrics, a 5.5% reduction in response time to clients, an 8% reduction in customer wait time overall, and an 8% reduction in thread length, meaning their team was resolving queries in fewer email exchanges.
Six ways to get full control over your email workflow
Team view — who is doing what
The starting point for any email workflow improvement is understanding what is actually happening across your team. The team view gives managers a side-by-side comparison of every team member, emails received, emails sent, response times, over any date range, with two years of historical data available from the day you start using Email Meter.
You can filter by email type to focus only on client-facing communication, by specific client groups, or by department. And you can sort by any metric, most emails sent, slowest response time, highest volume, to immediately identify where the workload is falling unevenly or where performance is lagging.
For more on how to use this data to manage your team's email activity, see our guide on how to monitor employee email activity.
SLA performance page — catch missed deadlines before clients do
The SLA performance page gives managers a real-time view of who is meeting their response time goals and who is not. You set the targets, for example, under 12 hours, between 12 and 24 hours, and beyond 24 hours, and the dashboard shows compliance for each team member at a glance.
If Dwight has missed four emails in the selected date range, you can click through to see exactly which emails they were, when they came in, who sent them, and how long it ultimately took to respond. This makes it straightforward to see which clients are being affected before it translates into churn.
The SLA performance page also supports proactive alerts, notifications that trigger before a deadline is missed, layered from agent to manager to senior management depending on the urgency and the client. For more on SLA targets and benchmarks, see our guide on SLA response time.
Shared inbox analytics — visibility into your generic addresses
For teams managing shared inboxes, sales@, support@, info@, Email Meter shows who is doing what inside each address without requiring any changes to your current workflow. No ticketing system, no new platform, no disruption.
The shared inbox view shows each agent's workload percentage, email volume, and response times within a selected inbox. If one person is handling 10% of the work and taking longer to do it than everyone else, that pattern is immediately visible — and actionable.
For more on shared mailbox management, see our guide on shared mailbox vs distribution list.
Unreplied and unactioned emails — inbox health monitoring
Beyond response times, Email Meter tracks whether emails are being actioned at all. You define what "actioned" means for your team, a reply, a forward, an archive, a label, and the dashboard shows for each team member how many emails received that action and how many did not.
An email that has been sitting unactioned for one day suggests a workload problem. An email sitting unactioned for 10 or 15 days suggests something more serious. You can drill into the raw data to see exactly what is waiting, where it came from, and how long it has been there before a client follows up.
Automated reports — the right data at the right time
All of the views above can be automated. If you have a Monday morning sales meeting and you need each sales rep's performance data ready before it starts, Email Meter can send that report automatically, with whatever filters and date ranges you need, directly to your inbox.
Automated reports remove the manual work of logging in and pulling data. The insight arrives when you need it, configured exactly the way you want it.
AI sentiment analysis — see which clients are unhappy before they leave
The final layer of visibility is sentiment analysis and it requires processing the body of your emails rather than just the metadata. Email Meter trains an AI model on your specific definition of positive, neutral, and negative emails, then applies it across all your client communications.
The result is a dashboard that shows, for every client, what their sentiment trend looks like. You can see immediately which clients are happy, which are neutral, and which are unhappy. You can order clients from most negative to most positive. And you can filter by query type to see which categories of emails, quality complaints, billing issues, access problems, are generating the most negative sentiment.
As Laurence put it: "It's really hard to know who's unhappy, who is happy, with such high email traffic that it's easier for things to just get lost. The idea behind a page like this is that you have a really easy view to show who's happy, who isn't, if the trends over time are good or bad."
For more on how email sentiment data connects to client churn, see The 90-Day Warning Sign Your Best Clients Are About to Leave.
Questions from the audience
Does Email Meter work if we use Salesforce or another CRM?
Yes, on two levels. First, as long as your team's emails are still running through Gmail or Outlook, Email Meter can track all of that activity regardless of which CRM you use. Second, Email Meter can integrate with your CRM via API — pulling your client lists, account values, and segmentation data into Email Meter so your analytics are enriched with the context you already have in your CRM. This works with HubSpot, Salesforce, and other platforms.
Why is it important to monitor how your team engages with customers?
Unhappy customers leaving is a real drain on revenue and it is almost impossible to know who is unhappy until they actually leave without the right visibility. Email Meter gives managers the insight they need before it affects revenue — knowing who is being neglected, which clients are at risk, and which team members need support, all in one place.
Do the AI features work the same way for every customer?
No, every AI feature is built from scratch specifically for your use case. Email Meter works with each client to understand what they want to measure, what positive and negative look like in their specific context, and what the dashboard should show. The tool evolves over time too — as you learn more about your workflows and what matters most, the dashboard can be updated to reflect that. As Laurence described it: "We consider ourselves a productized consultancy — we change the tool as we learn more about the way that you work."
