Why stick to 3 core customer service goals?
By setting a limited number of clear and highly achievable 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. This matters because there’s already plenty resting 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. Adding to this kind of pressure by demanding your teams meet lots of different customer service goals can make matters worse. Instead, focus on just three core goals and you can lead your team to a place of calm, lift up your customer service, and focus on making a genuine difference to team morale, business growth, and customer experience.
How to set your 3 core goals and which key metrics to measure
Ultimately, what you 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. Use a framework like Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) or Key Performance Indicator (KPIs) to introduce your customer service goals, keep happiness as your north star, and focus on these three goals to quickly get far ahead:
- Increase customer satisfaction
- Maintain speed and efficiency in resolving queries
- Reduce your customer service costs
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 content 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.
2. Maintain speed and efficiency 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) (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.
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.
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 for each of the three core goals 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 goals out the park.
Top tip: Be sure to celebrate every win to build team confidence and achieve even greater success to drive the growth of your business.
How to further improve your chances of meeting customer service goals
There are more things you can do alongside goal-setting to increase your chances of consistently achieving what you set out to do. These killer combos are all worth considering to support your efforts and reinforce all the good work you’re doing:
A. 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.
B. 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 a customer-centric mindset a priority and nurture empathy in customer services, customers are likely to be happier, knowing they’re important, heard and understood, and you’re consistently doing all you can to improve their experience.
C. 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.
All of these tactics can help improve customer service overall, but that’s not all. You’ve AI tools at your disposal too. Keep reading to find out how AI can help with all of the above.
Here’s how a next-generation AI assistant can help you meet your customer service goals:
- Use an AI assistant to get instant feedback from every customer to measure CSAT in real time, while they’re still ‘in the moment’
- Give instant answers to queries 24 hours a day to improve FTR
- Cut costs, like Barking & Dagenham Council who saved £48,000 in six months
- Offer customers self-service, so they can solve complex tasks quickly and independently via simple integrations with your AI assistant and business systems
- Use an AI assistant and 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, WhatsApp, or a smart speaker
- Collect real time feedback from every customer, every time they speak with your AI assistant to highlight issues before they turn into bigger problems 👍👎
- With AI it’s easy to personalise experiences for every customer to build stronger relationships
- Free up your support teams to focus on higher-level tasks and improve their job satisfaction and performance, leading to better outcomes for your business overall
“We noticed an instant reduction in email enquiries, thanks to [EBI.AI’s] solution. What surprised us even more was the high success rate from the start, and it’s only been growing. Our members have effortlessly embraced and interacted with our AI assistant, and we’re excited to expand its usage even further in the upcoming year.”
~ Rachael Pearson, Head of Marketing and Digital for The Camping and Caravanning Club
Join the AI revolution
As the needs and preferences of your customers evolve, setting a few core customer service goals will help you keep a close eye on what you need to achieve next.
Take inspiration from other organisations already using AI automation or create your own road map, but either way, use your goals to keep everyone on your teams motivated, using the tactics and tools available to satisfy your customers.
Focus on your three key goals and start today.
