A Quick Guide for Customer Service Smart Goals

With the right customer, service goals can help in boosting the customer satisfaction of your company. Not just that, it can help increase loyalty as well as create a new conversion.

However, it’s important that you know where you need to start, and what metrics and strategies to put into use? Here you need to create SMART goals, and to start with here is a guide for you. 

What To Know About SMART Goal in Customer Service?

One of the worst mistakes you can make is setting customer service goals that are too vague and have unrealistic objectives. 

The SMART framework helps in creating goals and avoiding these mistakes. 

It stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. So by using this, you can create a goal that is perfect and attainable. 

To understand how it works in a customer service goal, here is what you need to know. 

Specific 

Your team should know when is the right time to track towards the goal. If the goal is well worded as explained, it will help in giving a clear idea. 

And your team will feel the satisfaction of achieving success in each step. 

Measurable 

The goals are on the right track when you are achieving the set milestones that you are using to measure your success. 

There are metrics involved for helping you in comparing results when the strategies were implemented to the after results. 

It helps in comparing and understanding how far you are able to come to achieve the goal. 

Attainable 

The goal you choose for your customer service should be attainable. While it would be much easier to achieve, it helps in boosting growth. 

Also, you should want your teacher to successfully achieve these goals, so give them the opportunities even though it feels like a challenge. 

Relevant 

When you are setting the goal, the team should have an understanding and align it with what’s the purpose behind it. 

The Goal here needs to match with your company values and expectations so the employee understands what exactly they are working to pursue. 

Time-Based 

Goals that are time-based add urgency and it’s an important element that helps in speeding up the process. 

Deadlines help in motivating the employees to complete the work on its decided time and representing the clear finish line for achieving the goal. 

Customer Service Smart Goals

Why Do Companies Need SMART Customer Service Goals? 

Take time when you are setting goals for the team as well as yourself to like talking to check the map. 

You know where everyone is heading and how much time it would take to reach it. 

Goals Help In Giving Focus And Direction 

This can help in leading to more independence where everyone knows where they are heading. Also, you need to know that everyone is on one page. so they can make their decisions and act more autonomously. 

Goals Help In Managing Performance 

Stated goals can also help in facultative feedback like opportunities and providing the benchmark to everyone in a team to measure against each other. 

Goals Help In Aligning Actions Of Everyone 

In your team, even agents to managers are required to work together in order to make the company successful. However, showing one initial action can generate success and it helps in aligning the action of everyone to contribute. 

How To Set Your SMART Customer Goals?

Setting customer service goals is an important procedure and you need to be sure how to do it. 

It’s important so you know you are going in the right direction and achieving the goals you set, well here is a five-step to start with : 

Cordate The Setting Of Goal With The Company 

Customer service goals focus especially on your customer, their satisfaction, retention as well as referrals instead of large marketing and business goals set in different teams. 

However, it doesn’t mean that your goal should not align with the rest of the company. 

In fact when you are making sure that the goals are coordinated with the rest of the team. It means everyone has a single vision and mission. 

On top of that, when you are going to measure success, it will be much easier to do it including other teams. 

Set Tactics Clear In Order To Achieve The Goals 

When it comes to tactics, it is important that you are sticking with consistent and clear tactics that help you in having your goals. 

Well, tactics are the actionable steps that should be taken in order to achieve the final goal.

For example,  let’s say your goal is to increase your customer retention by 5%, here are some of the tactics that you can use including : 

Increasing the employee training on social media and live chat customer service

Writing as well as scheduling more notes such as thank you and we miss you. 

Offering the newsletter on the new week with the original content and tips to help. 

Challenge Your Team To Get Out From Comfort Zone 

Well, you do want to set goals that are easy to attain, however it should not be too easy. 

Also not making it too unstable such as increasing customer retention by 50% within a month. 

It can be easy to maintain customer retention. However, the challenging travel goal can be increasing retention by 5%. 

  • If you are keeping the same goal, it will bore your customer as it creates monotonous work.
  • Due to this, it makes the work boring, leading to laziness, incompetence, and increasing the number in employee turnover. 
  • Eliminating these factors should start with giving fresh goals with every month, quarter, and time frame you choose. 

With the help of a challenge, you can boost productivity and remind employees that what they do matters. 

Tracking Progress Of Individual And Team 

Since you are assigning different work to different employees with different work, you should have tracking of their progress. 

Not just it should be individually but as the entire team too. With this, you can pinpoint if something goes wrong as you will know the root cause. 

Tracking the progress visually can help employees feel like they are being heard. 

When you are handling a team with a large number, it’s much easier to lose sight. 

So it’s better to discuss with each person their progress, strength, and weakness. 

Meet On Regular To Discussing The Changes 

Just because your goals are the same, it doesn’t mean you should not stick together. 

It’s important that you do the meeting on the regular term, it can be short or long, depending on what fits the schedule. 

These meetings should be focused on getting feedback and asking what’s working and whatnot. 

If you are moving forward, you can do the bar raise if not then lower it. 

Goal setting should be flexible, keeping in mind that you might have to do some of the changes and taking into consideration what your team is giving feedback. 

Example OF SMART Customer Service Goals 

Customer service goals should be directly related to the wider organization’s goals. 

They should be easy to track and frequent in the discussion. Each individual should be contributing to these SMART goals. 

Here are some of the examples that you can consider if you are looking to set SMART customer service goals. 

Increasing  Rate Of  Customer Satisfaction 

One of the primary reasons why a company offers customer service is to improve the happiness of the customer. 

Most if not all customer service teams use customer satisfaction ( CSAT) as one of their KPIs or key performance indicators. 

After all,  if the customer is not satisfied with what you are offering, it can change what you are doing. 

So you boost customer satisfaction as it’s a worthy goal for boosting the company’s growth. 

  • According to salesforce, 67% and 74% of business buyers pay more if they are having a great experience.
  • The studies of Qualtrics XM found that customers who receive a good experience are more than 3.5 times more likely to purchase and do it even 5 times more to be recommended by the company to friends as well as relatives.

With the help of setting goals can improve satisfaction as it puts the focus on the team. 

For example, The smart goal here is to roll a 7-day CSAT score from 82% to 87% within three months. 

Reducing The Waiting Time Of Customers 

In the mission in order to provide great customer service. And here speed is the important aspect 

Customers consistently rate quickly the answer which is the most important aspect of their customer service experience. 

So responding faster is a team goal, not only do agents have more focus as well as treating the conversation with urgency. But they also need to have the right tools for sports and staff. 

For example, The smart goal here can be to decrease the average first reply time for email support from 11 hours to 7 hours by next month. 

Reducing The Cost Per Contact 

Well in the case of having an unlimited budget, reducing the wait time and increasing satisfaction should be straightforward. You can get more people to hire and give all customers a happy experience.

But everyone needs to balance their desire to grow and the restrictions in the budget. 

Reducing the cost of the supporting customer while making sure you are maintaining the quality. 

It’s an important goal that you should have for a business where everyone should contribute. 

If it costs more to support than they are paying, then it will not be profitable to the business.

To measure the cost per contact or CPC, divide the total cost of providing the support including labor, tools, and more costs by the numbers you are in contact received. 

You can use this by considering different criteria including the type of users and contact channel.

For example, you can use this as a SMART goal for reducing the cost per contact by boosting 10% for free plans by the end of Q1.

Increasing The Quality Of The Customer Service Response 

Customer rank consistency is the prime driver of a prodigy’s good customer service. 

However to monitor the team’s replies and their quality as well as consistency for implementing the assurance review. 

For example, the smart goal here can be to increase the average quality score from 3.5 to 4.2 by the end of this year. 

Improving The Happiness Of Your Agent 

When your employees are happy, your customers will be happy too. 

At the very least, make sure your employees are not unhappy as it will make it harder for them to be empathetic.

To measure the happiness of the agents, you can do it in different forms.  One of the direct ways that you can consider is to ask them directly. 

For example, you can set it as a SMART goal by increasing the employee NPS by 20% between September to December in the employee surveys. 

improving The Troubleshoot Skills 

All of the customer support needs to have an understanding of how to handle the troubleshooting issue.

However, it can improve over time. So if you are struggling to handle and accurately diagnose the problems, improving your troubleshooting skills can be the ideal goal. 

For example, the smart could be increasing troubleshooting cricket scores or the assurance review quality from 2.4 to 4 by the end of the month. 

Improving The Leadership Skills 

Whether you want to become the people manager or take more responsibility for the individual contributor role, leadership skills are the key to the agent’s growth. 

Including leadership skills as a goal for agents, it helps in motivating and challenging the opportunities. 

However, the skill of leadership is not measured by having metrics and quantitative. 

For example, the SMART goal you can set here is to lead two meetings for product training in Q4 and meet the manager for getting feedback as well as review on each session. 

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