As per a study by Harvard Business Review, people who have set goals in their life are 10 times more successful compared to those who haven’t.
So, be it in life or in business, you need to set goals, work hard, and stay on course to achieve success.
Setting goals is important in an area like customer service because it’s a field where you are expected to deliver a positive customer experience and handle numerous communication channels consistently.
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A customer support team in a company plays an important role in establishing a brand reputation in the market. So, in today’s highly competitive world, it is important that we set goals to ensure the success of our customer support team.
Remarkable client support can get you up to 70% of extra income from existing clients. Although there isn’t any magic wand to make customers happy and build long-term relationships, there are a few proven strategies that can help you to do so.
In the following article, we will learn how to set tangible goals for customer satisfaction with some popular metrics to measure your progress. Along with that, we will also look at 8 SMART customer service goals that have been adopted by real companies and how we can achieve those goals through practical and simple steps.
What are SMART Goals in Customer Service?
Quite possibly, the most obvious mistake that associations make when setting customer service goals is by creating unrealistic objectives. The SMART framework will help them to avoid this.
By setting goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound (SMART) you can make sure that you’re on the road to customer service perfection.
A specific goal allows you to work towards a clear objective without any confusion and frustration. You can combine your team’s efforts toward a planned schedule.
Your goal is meaningful as the metrics used for measuring it. Unless you can back your effort with some valuable data. There is no other way through which you will be able to determine whether you have achieved your goal or not. And therefore, it is important to set measurable goals.
You must choose a goal that might challenge you, but it should be attainable. Or else, you will set yourself up for failure. Therefore, you must establish realistic goals that you will be able to achieve with proper planning and won’t depend on factors that you can’t control.
You must choose a goal that would balance customer service as well as business revenue. Set relevant goals that can contribute towards it to maximize the return on investment.
You must introduce fixed time frames to achieve your goals, this will provide you with visibility of your short-term and long-term objectives for better forecasting.
Top 5 Customer Satisfaction Goals and Various Ways to Achieve Them
Shorten the Customers’ Waiting Time
If said in simple words, customer waiting time is that time which the customer spends waiting from the moment they ask a query till they receive an answer to it.
How can you measure this goal?
You can measure your team’s responsiveness using the following metrics like
- First Response Time
- Average Call Pickup Time
- Average Resolution Time
- Average call Handling Time
What can you do to Achieve this Goal?
- Ensure Omnichannel Availability: You can’t pick and choose the platform, so make sure that you are available to address the concerns of your customers either by email or a social media post. Make it more straightforward for them to contact you by quickly sharing the contact details with customers.
- Provide 24/7 Support: Problems can come at any time of the day or night, and there is nothing more frustrating than receiving a message stating that your team is available only from 9 to 6 working hours.
So, try to manage sources in a way that they are available 24×7 to respond to your customers’ queries. As phone calls are a preferred channel for customers who want instant solutions, make sure your team is available to handle the call flow efficiently.
- Use Interactive Voice Responses: Using IVRs can significantly reduce the call burden on your team. IVRs can also be used to answer customers’ frequently asked questions.
Use live chatbots on the website to immediately resolve customers’ concerns.
- Incorporate CRM: You can integrate your communication channels with a customer relationship management system so that you can keep track of each conversation and bridge the gaps accordingly.
Avoid Issues & Complaints
Irrespective of how quick your resolutions are, you are bound to sink the satisfaction levels of customers if they are facing the same kind of problems repeatedly.
Putting forth a goal to forestall issues and grievances is very important because it is important to gain customers’ loyalty and trust.
How can you measure this goal?
You can measure this goal by counting the number of complaints/tickets you receive in a period.
- By recurring issues reported
- By learning the impact of the issues
How will you accomplish this Goal?
- You can set up real-time monitoring systems to track performance.
- You can send automated alerts to customers as soon as their issue is resolved.
- You can work on the internal processes to improve efficiency.
- You can provide an honest issue analysis and ensure accountability to avoid future instances.
Increase NPS and CSAT Scores
NPS and CSAT are two popular metrics to gauge the performance of your product and services.
NPS is Net Promoter Score is measured on a scale of 1 to 10. NPS determines how willing the customer is to purchase from your business repeatedly or refer it to a friend or relative.
CSAT is a Customer Satisfaction Score that determines a customer’s satisfaction level with current services.
What will you do to achieve your goal?
To achieve your goal, you can collect CSAT and NPS scores (with CSAT software) from the clients. Calls and messages are the most famous method for doing as such. You can likewise attach the survey on the website or the product present on the dashboard.
- You can even design a quick survey that provides you with the necessary data points.
- You can add a comments section to get some additional information to improve your processes.
Feedback is an essential piece of client care that can assist you with adjusting your efforts to the client’s expectations and check if you’re doing everything right.
Offer Personalize Services to Customers
Personalization is a game-changer for any business. Therefore, 80% of customers prefer businesses that offer personalized services.
Personalization moves the attention on the client and requests organizations to tailor their pre-sales and after-sales processes to meet customers’ unique expectations.
Personalization is important because customers want solutions to their problems, not a ready-made product that will not meet their complete requirements.
What will you do to measure this goal?
- You can use the CES score (obtained using Customer Survey Software) to measure your customers’ efforts to achieve their goals.
- You can calculate ROI for each client to measure whether you are investing resources and efforts in the right direction or not.
How can you achieve this goal?
You can achieve this goal by:
- Creating industry-specific case studies to engage clients to spend more.
- Map your customers’ journey and persona with suitable marketing efforts.
- Keep in touch with your clients to understand their growth plans and provide them with solutions complementing those pursuits.
- Monitor your clients’ usage and suggest ways to get maximum returns by making the most of your product.
Allow Smooth Self-Service
Self-service encourages customers to use the product optimally without depending on your support team. It benefits them a lot as they can use the product anytime at their convenience and save your team’s time to focus on other important tasks.
How can you measure this goal?
Generally, feedback forms and surveys are the most common methods used to understand customers’ perceptions. Therefore, you can use a feedback form at the bottom of each helpdesk article to see if your product documentation answers the customer’s queries correctly or not.
What can you do to achieve this goal?
- You can plug-in support bots to the product that will help customers understand the next step based on their activity.
- You can create a complete knowledge base with readable feature articles and frequently asked questions.
- You can share playbooks and videos to make the product user-friendly.
- You can introduce customers to forums where they can drop their questions.
- You can monitor your customer’s execution by following feature usage.
The self-service assistance technique functions admirably with newly onboarded customers who need a bit of hand-holding for an initial few weeks. This is an important stage as it sets the customers’ expectations for your product.
Conclusion
Businesses these days consider themselves to be customer-centric and try to show that they are exceeding their customers’ expectations.
However, this will mean nothing if customers leave their business for competitors.
When you say that you serve your customers better and improve their satisfaction levels, then the results will show them as having a loyal customer base and increasing sales revenue. And it is certain that you cannot do it without proper planning.
Setting SMART goals for customer satisfaction will help your business and customers as well and will allow your employees to focus in the right direction. We hope that the above-mentioned goals can help you achieve higher profitability and a better customer experience in 2022.
