How to Create Awesome Customer Service Goals for Success
Today’s customers are more demanding than ever.
They want what they want when they want it and how they want it.
If businesses don’t deliver, potential customers won’t hesitate to keep looking for other options.
Once gone, customers may never return, cutting your profitability.
That’s why customer calls should always come first.
To avoid customer issues and keep customers returning, you must deliver excellent customer service.
Delivering excellent customer service shouldn’t be challenging
Positive customer experience is essential for the success of a company. Building a team of customer service agents to represent you in their communication with your customer base requires strategy and dedication.
You need to set relevant goals for your customer support team and come up with a realistic plan to reach those goals. Achievable goals will help deliver the type of customer interaction your clients are looking for. It will also help you buildcustomer loyalty and pump-up corporate profitability.
Personalize your goals to match your business goals
Various examples of customer service may be your starting point, but you need to tailor your goals according to the type of support you’re looking to provide and your audience.
Your customer support agents will be your interface with the world and lead the way to customer success. They need to learn the ins and outs of your business and be able to answer more than common questions.
If your customer service objective is to improve customer satisfaction, for example, you need to set goals that address key service challenges, like having customers re-explain issues or having them spend too much time addressing an issue.
How Goals Boost Customer Service
Setting objectives for customer service will help your team of customer service reps deliver the level of customer satisfaction you’re looking for.
Your team will focus to achieve a specific goal that drives things forward.
If you’re trying to boost customer satisfaction and keep your customers happy, you can send out a simple survey requesting customer feedback shortly after a transaction takes place.
Customer surveys are crucial if you’re looking to deliver a flawless customer service experience. Customer complaints should never be ignored, either. Learn, change, and get better!
Ongoing feedback helps you and your entire customer service team to meet customer expectations and achieve critical customer service goals.
If customers aren’t happy with the service provided, you can discuss customer service strategies with your customer service professionals and find ways to ensure an excellent customer experience.
Setting goals helps you evaluate team performance.
Team performance data can tell what’s working and what’s not working for your team of customer service representatives. (You can also tell who on your team is performing well and who isn’t.)
If you’re not achieving your customer satisfaction goals, team performance data will help you identify potential issues you can address and customer service skills that need to be improved.
Tracking performance data will also help set a baseline for the quality of service you expect your entire team to deliver.
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Set Goals that Leave No Room for Guessing
Ideally, you want to set customer service goals that leave no room for guessing. In other words, you want to set goals that are:
- Specific
- Challenging
- Realistic
- Quantifiable
- Relationship focused
- Empowering the employees
Setting goals help drive day-to-day interactions between team members and customers and improves the customer journey.
But you have to be careful when setting team goals.
Making them too hard to reach may have a negative effect by demotivating your team. Team members will quickly burn out trying to achieve them.
Setting goals that are too easy to reach, on the other hand, accomplishes the bare minimum or, in some cases, nothing.
Attainable goals are always key when you’re trying to motivate your team to improve!
Setting the right type of goals, however, is only half the battle.
The other half is providing the tools your team needs to achieve the goals.
For example, if you want your team to seem knowledgeable when talking to customers, you need to provide the tools needed to boost responsiveness. Without these tools, your team can’t achieve key customer service goals.
How to Set Measurable Customer Service Goals
Senior executive goals are broad and strategic. They align with crucial company objectives.
Managers’ goals are operationally inclined. They drive productivity and efficiency.
The goals for customer service are, however, customer oriented. Effective customer service goals focus on things like improving response time and boosting resolution rates.
Below are six tips that can help you create effective and measurable goals that drive excellent customer service:
1. Determine your direction
First, you need to determine your direction. What will success look like three months from now, six months, and one year from now?
Is anything holding you back right now from achieving them?
What opportunities out there do you want to explore? Think big here and be creative. You can break down these goals into milestones.
2. Set easily identifiable goals
You want easily identifiable common goals. That way, you’ll know when you reach them.
Vague goals like becoming an industry leader will not be helpful.
Examples of good support goals are boosting first contact resolution rates by 20 percent, enhancing customer satisfaction rates by 30 percent, and increasing customer retention rates by 15 percent.
3. Link customer service and company goals
When you think about aligning support and corporate goals, imagine you and your team in a huge rowboat. If everyone’s goals align, your rowing will be in sync, and you’ll be heading in the same direction. If your goals aren’t aligned with the company’s goals, you’ll spin around all over the place.
4. Set one primary goal at a time
Goal competition seldom works.
When you have too many customer service goals vying for time and attention, you cut your chances of attaining them. Having too many goals also demoralizes your team when they don’t show significant progress on behalf of each.
Pick one overriding goal, such as improved customer satisfaction, and go with it.
5. Make your goals meaningful
Create intrinsic goals, not extrinsic ones.
Intrinsic goals are things like meaning and purpose, while extrinsic goals are things like money and new cars. Intrinsic goals make employees happier and motivate them to work hard to achieve them.
You want everyone on your team to know why you’re setting customer service department goals and how they impact the company.
6. Create goals that you can review
You need to take this one step further. Customer service goals need to be trackable and promotional.
Make sure you keep your goals visible.
That way, people can see how much progress they’re making on reaching them. You can use things like digital dashboards, post-it notes, email, gauges, and so on.
Conclusion
Having created your customer service goals, make sure you review them regularly. This will allow you to see the progress or lack of it.
Goals shouldn’t be carved in stone. Instead, they should be adaptable and changeable. If your existing approach isn’t working, change it. You want customer goals to drive you forward in the right direction, increase the number of loyal customers and, at some point, encourage growth and purchases.
Celebrate success. And do it together as a team.
Recognizing what your team achieves and how it achieves it keeps members motivated. Maybe take everyone to a sumptuous meal at a fancy restaurant or attend a professional baseball or football game together. Once you’ve celebrated your success, move on to the next target.
Use the six tips above to create specific, quantifiable goals for your customer service team. Align these goals with a key company objective, like customer satisfaction. Then develop a solid plan to help your team achieve them cost-effectively.
Setting goals drives your team forward and helps deliver awesome customer service—the kind that keeps today’s customers coming back.
Post Update: The article was updated on November 29th, 2022 originally published on January 29th, 2019. It has been completely revamped and updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
