Customer Service Goals
How to Develop Realistic Customer Service Objectives
An obvious reason for setting customer service objectives is that it allows the entire team to focus and work towards one common objective.
For example, if the department’s objective is to improve customer satisfaction among those who contact customer support, some businesses offer customers the opportunity to participate in a “simple survey” at the end of the phone call or online response. This allows the customers to rate the quality of help they received on KPIs the department sets as a priority and indicates “customer satisfaction” such as knowledge, professionalism, and whether the service representative solved their problem.
The survey could include something as basic as how friendly and personable the service representative was. Such feedback can give the supervisors valuable information as to the customer's level of satisfaction.
Another reason for setting objectives for your customer service department is that it allows the team to measure the success or failure of their team, and, if needed, to reevaluate the team's direction. Basically, it defines metrics that will set a baseline of an exceptional level of customer satisfaction, acceptable satisfaction, average and so on.
Customer service is all about establishing a good relationship with your customer. If the representative is knowledgeable and pleasant to work with, it can and will pay big dividends for the business. Here are several things that need to be kept in mind when setting objectives for your customer service:
Be Specific: The objectives set should be specific and strictly defined so that success can be easily determined.
Don’t Make Objectives Too Easy: The objective should be challenging. In order for your company to grow, you need to continually be challenging to reach higher. In the world of modern business, if you are not going forward, then you can be assured that you are losing ground to your competitors.
Setting Realistic Objectives: Objectives should be challenging but they shouldn’t be impossible. Set your customer service objectives so that they are achievable with work and effort. Start small and be practical. As your team meets specific benchmarks, the objectives can then be revised and raised to a higher level.
Relationship-Focused: All objectives in a company's customer service area should always focus more heavily on the customer relationship rather than on the profit margin. If the degree of customer satisfaction is rated high, then it follows naturally that the profit margin will increase. The opposite of this is, unfortunately, true as well.
Quantifiable Objectives: In the same way that objectives should be specific is the same way that they should be measurable. If your objectives aren’t quantifiable in some way, then it’s difficult to define the success of your department.
Empower Employees: Customer service representatives should feel as they are supported in reaching their objectives. Organisations need to supply their employees the information, resources and the authority to fulfill customer needs in the majority of scenarios.
Top support teams are nearly 3.5 times as likely as underperforming teams to give their service agents the authority they need to make customers happy.
Make customers and employees happy with customer service objectives.
The top three service challenges faced by customer-centric organisations are:
Customers having to re-explain issues
Customers having to expend too much effort to resolve issues
Customers having to rely on contacting customer service
In order to address these and other customer-satisfaction issues, you need to have the ability to create and achieve adaptable objectives.
Even the most impressively-written, articulate objectives won’t do a company any good if they aren’t measurable and are impossible to attain. This holds true especially in regard to customer service teams, where the heart of the company's success depends on the day-to-day interaction between the team and the customer.
Being “knowledgeable,” “pleasant” and “providing exceptional customer service” are subjective. If your company’s objective is to provide exceptional support, give knowledgeable answers while remaining pleasant to your customers then you’ll need to define each in a way that is challenging, realistic, customer-focused and quantifiable.
On top of that, give your support team the tools to be “knowledgeable,” “pleasant” and “exceptional.” Keeping these rules in mind when setting your service objectives is how you’ll ultimately achieve (and exceed) the customer experience you're targeting… every single time.
