9 critical goals in customer service that every business must set

Customer service is responsible for keeping customers happy and eventually contribute to business metrics such as customer retention, revenues, etc. You could say customer service is like a middleman between the business and its customers.

Small team or big, you must be having a set of people taking care of customer service and support at your organisation. But, do you have a mechanism in place to measure its effectiveness?

Do you know if the methodology adopted by your customer service teams helps retain enough customers, what the First Contact Resolution looks like, or if the customers good mouth the support they receive from you?

The performance of your customer service can be measured with these 10 crucial customer service KPIs. But, in order to ensure you meet these KPIs, you must guide your team by setting good customer service goals for them.

In this article, we will help you understand which such goals you should set for your team right away.

What are good customer service goals?

We repeat. Customer service must aim at delivering great customer experience and maximum customer satisfaction. This, in turn, must act as a guide for your customer support team.

Such a guide can be divided into goals. A good customer service goal is practical and achievable.

How to set effective customer service goals?

You can use the SMART goals framework to ensure that your efforts don’t go to waste. SMART here stands for:

Specific

Measurable

Achievable

Relevant

Time-bound

By adopting SMART goals,

✅ You can sharpen your ideas

✅ Direct your efforts in the right direction

✅ Use time productively

✅ Improve your chances of achieving the ultimate customer satisfaction

The 9 important customer service goals

1. Optimise for customer needs

Step one is to understand and analyse customer needs. This helps to determine what a customer expects from a product or service.

You can conduct customer surveys, and market and industry researches to understand the needs, wants, preferences, and demands of your customers. The insights you get from these studies could also be used for product and marketing management.

You might tempted to skip this research. You could think that the usage of your product is obvious. But that is not always the case. Customers choose products based on the value they want to derive from the product or service.

For instance, one customer might purchase a watch to keep track of time and stay punctual. But another customer might get it because it is a style statement.

They both purchase the product, but they intend to use it in different ways. Thus, understanding the different needs that your customers derive from your products is important.

Another way in which you can understand your customer's needs is by creating buyer personas. These are fictional descriptions of your ideal clients based on data and market analysis. They help in directing product development to meet the needs of your target market.

Thus, by setting this goal for your customer service team, you can easily tailor your support strategies. Say you are creating a Help Center, or support videos. With the valuable knowledge of how your product is used by customers, you can make the content much more helpful for different customer use cases.

2. Prioritise customer self-service

Customer self-service means creating customer support in a way that customers can help themselves whenever they have any queries.

Customer self-service is a key element to include in your customer service offering. That’s because it can give your customers access to fast and easy solutions.

The customer support team will also derive extra benefits from this. Self-service helps reduce the call load and gives your customer service representatives more time to address complicated or unusual customer issues.

Your representatives no longer have to spend time responding to routine inquiries, allowing them to devote more time to customers with more pressing issues and demands.

Here’s how you can include customer self-service options.

Have a FAQs page on your website.

A FAQs page that has a list of all the common queries and answers to those queries can be extremely helpful for your customers. They can check the FAQs first to see how they can resolve their issue before calling your customer service team.

Create a comprehensive knowledge base about your product.

These come in multiple formats like written documentation, product walkthrough videos, articles etc.

These videos and articles can be uploaded to your website or other social media platforms. They can provide basic information on your products like how to navigate the website, setting up the products, minor repairs or fixes, etc.

The product articles can be a detailed description of what the product is about, what are the updated features, bug fixes etc.

Similarly, walkthrough videos and product videos can be visual explanations of the product articles. Try to keep such videos simple and short though.

Build an online user community.

User communities and forums enable your customers to exchange information and interact with like minded folks.

P.S. We wrote something about building a community around Chatwoot.

3. Focus on retaining customers

68% of your sales come from your existing customers. Retaining customers also matters because:

• They would speak well of your company and spread the word to their friends and relatives.
• Over time, loyal customers are more likely to spend more on your product(s).
• Customer retention has a higher return on investment (ROI) than customer acquisition.

Establishing this goal for your customer support team is good because when you have a customer who calls with a problem, he or she might be tempted to shift the product if the team does not provide a satisfactory solution.

When customer retention becomes a customer service goal to chase, the team goes above and beyond to make sure that customers have a good experience.

It is also important to measure customer retention every now and then to understand where you lack and then improve on the same.

To measure customer retention rate, subtract the total number of customers at the end of the period from the total number of customers at the beginning of the period.

Generally, doing a monthly analysis will help you get a clear picture of your progress on the goal.

P.S. Read our article on customer satisfaction stories to understand how to achieve the ultimate customer satisfaction.

4. Create a good feedback mechanism

Customers’ opinions are important as they act as a roadmap for your business. Customer feedback is the opinions, concerns, and suggestions your customers share during their interactions with your business.

This feedback can inspire good change in your team by highlighting areas of improvement. But before you start collecting customer feedback, it is important to keep a couple of things in mind.

• You need to know why you are collecting feedback.
• You must design a non-invasive feedback collection mechanism.

There are various ways in which you can collect feedback. You can use post-support feedback surveys where your customer has to answer a few questions on their experience with the support process and staff.

These surveys can have questions like “Please rate the conversation on a scale of 1 to 5.” Or it can also have questions like, “Are you satisfied with the resolution, on a scale of 1-10?”

Such questions help you gauge your customers’ sentiments immediately after they have interacted with your support team.

You can also consider sending feedback surveys over emails to your regular customers. This will help you understand how their experience has changed over time, and what else can you improve to retain more customers.

5. Improve First Contact Resolution

First Contact Resolution (FCR) is the number of queries that your customer support executives can solve during the first interaction out of all the queries received.

The higher the FCR, the better your team’s ability to resolve queries at the first interaction itself.

To improve your FCR,

• Try to ensure that you have a strong knowledge base for your team to refer to.
• Provide quality training on handling basic customer issues.
• Imbibe a culture of pro-active resolution-offering. Your customers will be most satisfied when they have to put in the least effort after they have raised a complaint with you.
• Try to keep the customer’s information and query details handy so that your customers don’t have to answer unnecessary questions.
• Help your team develop empathy and the habit of active listening.
• Try to create a more conversational interaction.

Setting the goal of improving FCR is beneficial because:

• By offering real-time support, you increase your chances of having more satisfied customers.
• Customers like to have their problems solved as soon as they arise. And having a goal to achieve high FCR will help you fulfil this expectation.
• Aiming for a high FCR will encourage your service team to resolve issues as meaningfully as possible on the first interaction itself.

It is also important that you monitor your FCR regularly to achieve your target. To monitor your FCR as accurately as possible, track contact resolution on every customer support channel that your business uses.

If it is a phone call, check if the issue was resolved on the first call itself. Similarly, if it was a live chat, check if the complaint was addressed in the first conversation itself.

FCR goes hand in hand with other metrics. So improving FCR will help you to achieve your other customer service goals.

For instance, customers are more satisfied when complaints are resolved in the first instance. This will directly reflect on your CSAT score as your customers are more likely to give positive feedback.

You can expect a 1% increase in your CSAT score when your FCR increases by 1%.

Moreover, when you focus on improving FCR, you also help your customer support team to reduce repeat calls. This means that the call load reduces on your team and they are able to perform better.

6. Add a human touch to your customer experience

To achieve excellent customer service, reducing the templatised talk is important.

Automated and generic responses are good for generic questions. But the thing is that your FAQ pages and Help Center can anyway take care of the generic and repetitive questions.

To lead a more customer-centric approach, it is important that there is a human element in how you communicate. The question is what is the best way to achieve this human touch in delivering customer service?

Personalise, Personalise, Personalise.

One of the key elements of creating a more customer-centric experience is to personalise your service delivery.

After all, 65% of consumers think personalisation makes them more loyal to a brand. And 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from your brand if they know that you offer personalised services.

7. Increase brand loyalty

... through customer advocacy.

Keeping your customers happy can increase your brand loyalty. That's because happy customers will talk about your product and brand positively with their friends, colleagues, and family. This is also known as customer advocacy.

And you must remember that your most loyal customers are your biggest advocates.

Brand loyalty is when your customers connect with your brand on a personal level. They purchase from you without giving a second thought because they trust your brand so much.

Brand loyalty matters because

• Your customers are your walking advertisements.
• They are your cheapest and most authentic source of brand promotion.
• Loyal clients are more eager to recommend your business to others.
• They are also more likely to make another purchase from you in the future.

When you offer good customer service, your customers become your loyalists and advocate for your brand.

So if you want to increase brand loyalty, you need to maintain a positive connection with your customers. And, providing good customer support is an indispensable part of the process.

Three ways you can approach this are:

• Respond to customers' and followers' social media comments and engage with their posts whether or not they mention your brand.
• You can also create a newsletter delivered right into your customers’ mail inbox with the latest updates, upcoming launches, etc.
• You can create special loyalty programs for your customers who have been associated with you for a long time. For instance, birthday and anniversary discounts, freebies on special occasions like New Years’, Christmas, etc.

8. Deliver better services by measuring customer satisfaction

Without insights into how your products and services are performing, you cannot deliver high-quality services.

You can get these valuable insights only by measuring customer satisfaction and monitoring the same on a regular basis.

Setting up a baseline for your customer satisfaction metrics is important. Giving structure and accuracy to your measures is vital, whether you use basic surveys or metrics like the CSAT scores.

Here’s how you can monitor customer satisfaction.

Create a customer satisfaction survey.

Designing and implementing a simple and easy-to-understand survey is important for tracking customer satisfaction.

Asking simple and straightforward questions will also increase the chances of customers taking these surveys.

No one likes to invest a lot of time in long and complicated surveys. For instance, keep questions as simple as “will you recommend our brand to your friends?” or something like, “Did you find our product worth the price?”

Take the help of metrics like CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) scores and NPS (Net Promoter Score) to measure customer satisfaction by using the data collected from the surveys.

CSAT scores are calculated by adding up all the positive responses divided by the total number of responses and then multiplying by 100.

You can use Chatwoot to create your own CSAT survey.

9. Make customer service more accessible

You might have multiple options and varieties in the products that you offer. But if you don’t have easily accessible customer service, you might be in for sad news.

If your customer service process is not easy and user-friendly, your customers will feel that you have poor customer service.

Poor customer service can result in

❌ Loss of existing customers

❌ Loss of potential customers

❌ Decrease in revenue

❌ Decrease in brand value

Thus, it is crucial that we make our customer service delivery more accessible for our customers. One of the ways to do this is to offer omnichannel customer service support.

Omnichannel customer support means providing an integrated support across multiple channels such as calls, live chat, chatbots, SMS, messaging, email, and social media.

This ensures that you reach out to a wider audience and multiple target groups. For instance, your customers in the younger age bracket might prefer social media, live chat, chatbots, etc. On the other hand, customers in the older age bracket might find phone calls, SMS alerts, and emails more helpful and easier.

So providing multiple options ensure that no one is dissatisfied or faces difficulty in reaching out to you.

Until next time

We hope we were able to help you today. If you want to improve your customer service skillset, do go through our helpful guides here.