SMART customer service goals to aim for in 2023

The road to unhappy customers is paved with vague intentions.

Solid goal setting is big for a support team’s success—and, by proxy, your customers’ happiness. Without it? You’re going to feel the bad effects.

The number one question I get: “What are your other customers doing?” Which is helpful only to an extent because what they do may not really be what you do. Copying off your neighbor’s test is not going to help you in this situation.

Sam Chandler, director, startup success, Zendesk

Understanding customer service goals: a deep dive

Using the SMART method, you can help your reps work towards the ultimate support goals: customer happiness, customer loyalty, and a great customer experience.

Specific: Design narrow, support-focused objectives

As mentioned earlier, knowledge creation is generally not an agent’s top daily priority. Hence, it’s considered extra work. That’s why investing in the right technology that facilitates knowledge creation is paramount for every smart goal.

Eighty percent of New Year’s resolutions fail. One reason? The objectives aren’t specific enough. To meet your goals, they must be highly specific and detailed.

Think about the New Year’s resolution nearly half of all people make: losing weight. A goal so broad can seem impossible to meet because it’s hard to know where to get started. That feeling of being overwhelmed causes most people to abandon the goal before they’ve really begun.

In plain words, what are you trying to accomplish in your business? And how can we relate that to your customer service?
Sam Chandler, director, startup success, Zendesk

What if, instead of having this vague, fuzzy objective, you zoomed in a little? Maybe, “I will walk two miles every day for three months,” or “I will lose two pounds a week for a total of 40 pounds in five months.” These goals are more likely to succeed because they break a larger, overarching goal into smaller, and more achievable, goals and tasks.

The same tactic can apply to customer service goals. “Improve customer satisfaction” can be broken down into targeted goals like “decrease call transfer occurrence by 30 percent over a six-week period.”

If you want to make sure your goals are focused enough, test them by making sure you can answer the following questions.

Say, for example, that you currently have customer complaints about the long wait times when they call support and you want to build a goal around improving first call reply times.

Based on these answers, you can set your new objective: “We will decrease our average support call wait times by 50 percent within six weeks by designing and implementing a targeted and detailed program led by Mark.” Instead of setting for the original objective—lowering wait times—you’ve crafted a goal that is more specific, detailed, and actionable. And you’ve invested in authentic customer care.

Measurable: Make a plan for tracking your customer service team’s progress

Metrics are the best way to objectively track how your goals are moving along. They’re especially valuable in support because so many measures of success aren’t always easily quantitative, like customer loyalty and customer happiness. But supporting your team with real-time metrics can be a great motivator.

To use metrics in customer service goal setting, choose one stat for every objective that clearly shows your progress. Consider these examples.

Focusing your goals around a single metric gives you a tangible way to see the results of your teams’ efforts. Honing this skill will help as you develop measurable goals.

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Achievable: Set effective customer service goals within reach of your customer service team

Make sure you only set goals that are within your team’s power to achieve independently of another team. Smart goal tip: “Gain 10% more customers this month” isn’t realistic for a support team alone. “I’ll get customers who say, ‘I want to decrease this or increase this by 30%.’ And I ask them, ‘OK, well, where did that 30% come from?’ Often it turns out they just pulled it out of their head, or they saw another company doing it,” says Sam Chandler, director, startup success, Zendesk.

Besides, growing a customer base also depends on the sales and marketing teams.

You really have to understand what it is that you’re trying to do, and what your customers need from you, and then your metrics should be built off of that.
Sam Chandler, director, startup success, Zendesk

Setting unachievable customer service goals can lower team morale and motivation—the exact opposite of what you want in goal setting. On the flip side, setting goals your team can reasonably achieve builds confidence and motivation. In fact, a 2019 study from the University of Basel ound that setting goals that are reachable are the key to personal well-being.

Sometimes, a reality check can be helpful to make sure your goals aren’t just pipe dreams. Grab another support manager to review these questions with you to determine if your goal is doable or not.

If you answered “no” to any of these questions, all hope is not lost. You just need to create a plan to get the resources you need to move forward.

Relevant: Make sure your goals resonate with the entire company

Good goals have to matter to more than just you, the team manager. They should tie into your customer’s pain points, your reps’ objectives and the company’s overall strategy. For customers, the support team’s objectives should alleviate product issues. For reps, the goals should help them meet their own individual objectives. And for the company, the goals should contribute to the overall organization’s vision and purpose.

Tying all team goals back to your company’s strategy gives your team a unified purpose—and reminds them that, ultimately, you’re all there for the customers.

Time-bound: Give your support reps a deadline to work toward

A deadline adds accountability. Once you have a due date set, you can work backward from that deadline. Set internal goals and check-ins to make sure your team is staying on task and hitting the mini-milestones necessary to be successful.

Short-term goals can be especially good at boosting team morale and motivation because patient reps quickly see results. These short-term goals can be either team-wide or individual for each person on the team.

Say your goal is increasing individual resolved issues by 10% this week compared to the previous week. If a rep averages 10 resolved issues a day, that’s an average of 50 issues a week. To reach a goal of a 10% increase, that rep only has to resolve one more issue a day.

This short-term goal can feel a lot easier to attain than setting the same goal on a larger scale. Small wins like this can keep your support team motivated, and achieving them can build confidence.

If you’re chasing a bigger goal, make it look like a short-term goal. See if there’s a way to break it up into mini-deadlines, so it’s more approachable for your team to tackle.

Setting the right timeline can make otherwise lofty goals more manageable and add a sense of challenge and urgency to easily attainable goals.

Set and measure SMART goals with Zendesk

The perfect partner for SMART goal setting? A CRM with advanced reporting features. Zendesk’s support suite includes advanced analytics that makes measuring your team’s progress easy. The wide variety of reporting features lets you customize your statistics to track what’s most important to your goals. Our platform also automatically tracks real-time customer interaction data for extra insights. You can use this data as a live feedback mechanism to see how your goals are directly affecting customer interactions.