For most service agents, it’s important to focus on delighting and supporting your customers to boost retention. But that becomes substantially more difficult if you’re not setting and pursuing the right objectives.
Great customer service shouldn’t be treated as an afterthought or an occasional luxury. As the client-facing side of everything, your service team plays an enormous role in the current and future health of your business.
Like any other department, those who are setting and achieving impactful customer service objectives thrive. In fact, 84 percent of organizations working to improve CX report an increase in revenue.
To begin setting the right goals, you need to understand the scope of impact they’ll have first.
Setting proper customer service objectives is an essential part of your flywheel. Think about it. When your service team hits their marks, you don’t experience friction in your flywheel and you continue fueling business growth.
To keep this valuable performance going strong, the inbound methodology is a must in your approach.
With inbound customer service, the focus is centered on attracting, engaging, and delighting your customers. This turns your smiling customers into passionate advocates for your brand.
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The methodology can be broken down into the following three stages:
Utilizing resources and positive testimonials, you can attract both existing and future customers to your company.
These resources can be in the form of an informational blog, video content, case studies, or any other content offers that can offer value to your audience.
Being ready to quickly engage with your customers in case the resources you’ve supplied aren’t enough is critical. Customers should be able to reach you through different channels, like email, phone, instant messaging, and even social media.
Responding to tickets in a timely manner not only provides quality service to them, but it boosts your reputation too.
Delighted customers leave happy reviews and may become a strong advocate who will share their positive experience with their friends.
Be sure to get helpful feedback from surveys to learn how you can improve each customer’s experience. Positive comments can even be used as recommendations.
Make sure that your customer service objectives align with each stage and are mapped to each aspect of your service team. The vague concept of “customer service” exists within a spectrum, with three different aspects of service.
Much more centered on reacting to a customer’s needs, support is about helping them with whatever they want, whenever they want. The customer calls the shots in this interaction, from start to finish.
Here, the services team takes much more initiative in reaching out to customers in order to offer a service. In this phase, you aren’t reliant on them to reach out to you with a problem. In contrast, service is more about you guiding the customer to business.
Expanding value mutually for your business and for the customer is what customer success is about. This occurs when you are able to upsell or cross-sell new products or services.
The customer may not have even known that they needed the new offer, but it supplies greater value to them. This requires in-depth knowledge of your clientele and can only be achieved once you’ve proven that you can guide and support effectively.
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With each customer service objective you set, there should be important metrics tied to it. For example, on an internal level, the metrics you might use to manage and track your goals include:
For actual customer service success, there are plenty of metrics you can use:
The first step in creating service objectives should be to audit your current processes. From there you can prioritize what weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and gaps you want to address.
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Next step? Determine what area you want to focus on, which you should base on your audit. There are several areas of service you can set goals for, like:
Write out SMART goals for each element once you’ve figured out your priorities. You want to do this as comprehensively as possible.
Build in due dates or time frames for each service objective that you write out and involve the whole company so that everyone is on the same page. Keep your team on track by aligning specific tactics and action items with each goal so that there’s no confusion in what needs to get done.
Here are some examples to review for a better idea of what great objectives look like.
No matter what goals you set, you should always cross refer your process with some best practices to make sure that you actually reach them. Here are some tips to follow:
They should understand why they’re chasing these goals and really believe in them. Be an example by demonstrating how your service goals align with the company’s bigger goals as a whole.
Put them up in communal spaces where everyone can be reminded of what they are working toward. It’s key to keep these goals at top of mind for your entire team.
Do this as often as achievements happen. Make a point to recognize your key players who stand out and have a large impact on the team’s goals.
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If you provide the right training and resources to educate your team, they’ll learn where they can improve and how to further excel.
Don’t leave your team in the dark when it comes to the development process. Share updates if your goals shift and evolve so that they can pivot accordingly. This keeps them on track and also builds trust between team members and leadership.
Equipped with the right customer service objectives, a thought out action plan, and full cooperation, your team is ready to drive customer retention and fuel business growth.