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3 customer service goals to master (and ...

3 customer service goals to master (and how AI helps you do it)

10 min read

Updated on 21st July 2023

Natalie Smithson
AI enthusiast | Tea addict | Focused on using AI assistants to win the working week
Customer service success with AI

There’s often only one opportunity to make a good impression on your customers and one interaction can be the rise or fall of your quest to be the number one brand name on their lips. How you treat your customers is their first inkling of what it’s like to use your products or services, so setting clear goals on how you’ll give them that exceptional experience is vital.

Three key customer service goals you can start working on today will have a huge impact on your success. Throw AI into the mix and you can achieve even more, faster ― you’re 2.1 times more likely to be a high performer if you do, says Salesforce. We’ll show you why.

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Why customer service goals are so crucial to your success How AI helps you deliver on customer service goals 3 customer service goals to focus on inc. real world examples of how AI helps Wider tactics that help you hit your customer service goals Choose the right AI tools for continuous growth

TL;DR

  • Keep customer satisfaction as your north star and measure your Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). A higher score can increase trust, which can lead to more sales and higher profits.
  • Measure the speed of your service by monitoring the average First Contact Resolution (FCR) and the First Response Time (FRT).
  • Measure your Cost Per Resolution (CPR) by taking the total cost of your customer service operations and dividing it by the number of enquiries successfully resolved during a specific time frame.
  • If you’re working towards improving customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty, which in turn leads to business growth, it’s crucial to set goals and find new ways of meeting them. By 2027, Juniper Research predicts up to 90% of customer queries will be handled by AI.
  • Track your progress consistently to win. Barking & Dagenham Council saved £48,000 in six months by automating their customer service with an advanced AI assistant and achieved 533% Return on Investment (ROI) in just nine.

Why customer service goals are so crucial to your success

By setting clear goals you give your customer service teams direction on where you want them to invest their efforts. You’re instantly working together towards a common business goal and everyone can be a part of it. It helps provide structure in among the mountain of things that already rest on the shoulders of your support teams:

  • Being timely and helpful when answering customer questions
  • Being easily reachable, offering support across multiple channels
  • Enhancing personal productivity and team efficiency
  • Aiming to reduce the number of abandoned baskets
  • Nurturing strong relationships with customers by increasing customer engagement
  • Helping improve customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty
  • Showing empathy and being transparent when complaints crop up
  • Encouraging positive ratings and reviews, and brand advocacy
  • Helping to build credibility for your business overall

It’s a lot, and having set goals cuts right through the noise, so your teams can focus.

When you’re clear on what you want to achieve and how you’ll go about it, you can make precise decisions about what needs to happen next, so team members don’t become overwhelmed.

Soar higher with your success by meeting wider company goals

When you create customer service goals, it’s not only your support teams that benefit. Making sure your customer service goals fit with your wider company goals can have a significant impact on the entire organisation because you create a culture of collaboration and shared ownership. This can help break down any silos and encourage cross-functional teams to work together, leading to increased productivity and better results across the board.

How AI helps you deliver on customer service goals

Good customer service is prompt and accurate, providing empathetic support that meets the needs of your unique customer base. It involves clear communication, a deep understanding of the product and services you offer, patience, and a genuine desire to help. Essentially, it’s about turning challenges into positive experiences to drive customer satisfaction and loyalty.

A next-generation AI assistant can help you do that. They’re quick to launch, easy to use, cheap to run, and can immediately level up your customer service game in multiple ways:

No wait times, no email backlog, no call queues, no passing between agents or departments, no guesswork on what to do next. These are all things that help keep your customers happy, engaged, and loyal to your brand.

Refine your support services with an advanced AI assistant

By automating repetitive tasks and providing quick solutions to common customer enquiries, your support teams can focus on more sensitive or complicated issues that require the human touch. You can also give a personalised experience to every customer and build stronger relationships. By freeing up your support teams to focus on higher-level tasks, you also improve their job satisfaction and performance, leading to better outcomes for your business overall.

The future of customer service is automated in all the right places

If you’re working towards improving customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty, which in turn leads to business growth, it’s not only crucial to set clear goals, but find new ways of meeting them too. Juniper Research predicts up to 90% of customer queries will be handled by AI by 2027 meaning human support can thrive too. AI is proving to be one of the most affordable ways to start reaching precise goals fast while still serving your customers and teams well.

3 customer service goals to focus on inc. real world examples of how AI helps

Ultimately, what you really want for your customers is greater happiness. When customers are satisfied, they buy more, talk about you in a positive light, and stick around for longer ― sometimes, forever. When you introduce customer service goals using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), Key Performance Indicator (KPIs), or whatever framework you choose, keep happiness as your north star and focus on these three goals to get far ahead quickly:

1. Increase customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is the most significant indicator of customer happiness and key to the success of any business. Gather feedback from customers to find out how contented they are with your service, so you know where to make improvements to keep them happy.

Key metrics: Measure Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), usually on a scale of 1-10 where 10 is most satisfied. A higher score can increase trust, which can lead to more sales and higher profits.

How AI can help: Use an AI assistant to get instant feedback from every customer to measure CSAT in real time, while they’re still ‘in the moment’.

2. Maintain speed and efficiently in resolving queries

A faster service helps to create a positive impression of your company and can lead to an increase in customer satisfaction. Customers who get their problems solved quickly and accurately are more likely to come back to you because of that positive experience.

Key metrics: Measure the speed of your service by monitoring the average First Contact Resolution (FCR) ― the percentage of customer issues resolved on the first attempt, and the First Response Time (FRT). This is how long it takes for a customer to receive a response from your customer service team, starting from the moment you first receive their enquiry.

To calculate your average FRT, take the sum of all your response times and divide it by the total number of enquiries you received in a given space of time.

How AI can help: An AI assistant gives instant answers to queries 24 hours a day, which improves FRT. FCR can automatically improve too since an AI assistant remembers every piece of information it ever learns, so there’s never any misinformation, incorrect detail, or mistakes once it’s been trained on everything your business does and how you do it.

3. Reduce your customer service costs

Increasing satisfaction and efficiency naturally leads to reduced customer service costs because you’ll have less complaints and problems to deal with, requiring less resource and less budget, so you’ll have more to spend on bettering customer experience. To examine where your money goes, we recommend you measure your costs on an individual enquiry basis. The more you strip down the costs, the more you can see what’s really going on and where you can make savings.

Key metrics: Measure your Cost Per Resolution (CPR) by taking the total cost of your customer service operations (including employee salaries, software and equipment) and divide it by the number of enquiries successfully resolved during a specific time frame.

How AI can help: Barking & Dagenham Council saved £48,000 in six months by automating their customer service and achieved 533% Return on Investment (ROI) in just nine. —> Quickly calculate your likely ROI before you launch an AI assistant with our handy online savings calculator.

Track your progress consistently to win

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” said Peter Drucker, one of the world’s greatest business thinkers. Keep a constant eye on your progress with weekly or monthly tracking and it’ll not only keep you focused and moving forwards, it also helps your teams stay motivated as they get closer and closer to knocking all three of these goals out the park.

Meeting your goals helps keep team morale high, so celebrate every win to build team confidence and achieve even greater success to drive the growth of your business.

Wider tactics that help you hit your customer service goals

There are more things you can do alongside goal-setting to increase your chances of consistently achieving the goals you set. These killer combos are all worth considering to support your efforts and reinforce all the good work you’re doing.

Enhance productivity and remove obstructions

Improve productivity in your customer service teams and they’ll be able to handle more queries more quickly. Removing obstructions is also key, because any obstacles in your workflows can stall progress, frustrate your teams, and slow down service response time. Straighten everything out and you can rapidly improve the omnichannel customer experience, impressing them across the board on all channels to give your customer satisfaction rating a natural boost.

How AI can help: Use an advanced AI assistant to handle routine and repetitive tasks, even if they’re complex. It can answer frequently asked questions or guide customers through standard processes, and through simple integrations with your business systems, also access customer information and accounts to personalise experiences and solve complex tasks independently.

An AI assistant can also help route queries to the appropriate department via a live chat service, so no time is wasted getting the customer the help they need.

Use the data your AI assistant collects while speaking with customers to identify any bottlenecks in your customer service process, or issues that need work, improving the overall efficiency and productivity of your support operation.

Prioritise the customer and practice empathy

Always putting the customer first might seem an obvious way to increase your customer satisfaction score, but putting this into practice consistently across your entire organisation is tougher than it might seem. Yet when you make it a prerogative to maintain a customer-centric mindset and nurture empathy in customer services and across your organisation, customers are likely to be happier, knowing they’re important, understood, and you’re consistently doing all you can to help them.

How AI can help: Having an AI assistant on the team means customers can make contact with you whenever they want, 24 hours a day, on any channel they want to use, whether it’s your website or WhatsApp, or a mobile app or smart speaker. It would cost a fortune to try and provide this service using real life agents, but missing vital communications from customers and forcing them to only contact you when it’s convenient to your opening hours can cost you too. AI is a favourable and affordable solution to help keep everyone happy and loyal to your brand.

Turn around problems and increase loyalty

Dealing with problems, bottlenecks, complaints, or other such issues appropriately and quickly prevents upsetting customers or breaking their trust. Keeping customer retention up pays off because 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers.

How AI can help: Collecting feedback from every customer, every time they speak with your AI assistant can help highlight issues before they turn into bigger problems. It can be as simple as giving people a thumbs up or thumbs down emoji to click on 👍👎, linking to a survey, or asking specific questions at the end of the chat. Everything you learn in the replies helps you be proactive in improving services to keep customers happy.

Choose the right AI tools for continuous growth

Launching a next-gen AI assistant is accessible and affordable for customer service professionals on any budget ― you only ever need pay for what you use. It’ll give your team more time to do their best work, save you money, and make sure your customers have a happier experience whenever they need help or information.

Advanced AI assistants must-haves

You can use an AI assistant simultaneously on multiple channels, including your website, social media channels, messaging services like WhatsApp, smart speakers and SMS to serve your customers from wherever they are, but make sure it has all the tools you need for growth.

Here are the non-negotiables:

  • NLP (natural language processing), so your assistant can recognise what your customers ask for and in their own words.
  • Easy integrations, so your AI assistant can do more for you over time by connecting to the business systems you use daily to manage customer relationships and transactions.
  • A human in the loop to make sure you get the most reliable data you need from your AI assistant to make strong business decisions and your customers are consistently best-served, no matter how much their needs evolve over time.

Join the AI revolution

As the needs and preferences of your customers are ever evolving, setting goals will help you keep a close eye on what you need to achieve next, whether you take inspiration from the success stories of other organisations already using AI automation, or create your own road map.

Use your goals to keep everyone on your teams motivated, using all the tools and tactics at your disposal ― including AI automation, to satisfy your customers.

Whether you’re launching your first advanced AI assistant or reinventing an old basic bot, you couldn’t have chosen a better time with so many opportunities for customer service innovation.

Focus on your three key goals and start today.

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