Customer service is an all-important section of businesses across the world. With poor service, client retention, and public relations, your corporation, a small startup, or just-beginning business will surely fail before it even gets on its feet.

Providing great service may seem like a piece of cake. In reality, it is a never-ending journey to clear communication, solving problems, and providing the best client experience possible. Setting goals can help you quantify your customer service performance and align your efforts with your company’s overarching objectives.

Keep reading to see how OKRs can help improve your business’s customer support.

Source: TeamGantt

What are OKRs?

Objectives and Key Results, commonly known in the business world as OKRs, is a method for creating and tracking objectives, seeing if the results are comparable to the pre-set goals. OKRs are usually time-restrictive and aligned with the ethos of the corporation, whether that be directly tangible or an intangible vision.

OKRs can help businesses create a clear guideline of what is most important to your business at a certain time period and how you can achieve it. Your objectives need to be attainable, ambitious, measurable, and pertinent to your company. OKRs can help in connecting the dream-like side of your business with reality.

Source: Retail Customer Experience

Set OKRs for Customer Service Goals

When creating OKRs for your company, you need to make sure the objectives are specific, measurable, achievable, time-bound, and realistic. Visit site to check out some examples of SMART goal setting.

  • Specific goals are direct and to the point. They are easy to attain, measurable in terms of quantitative or qualitative data, and reflect on the company’s overall success.
  • Measurable goals are quantifiable, so you can track your progress over time.
  • Achievable goals are within the realm of possibility for your business success – if your goal is too lofty, your employee confidence will diminish.
  • Realistic goals help you stay level-headed and prevent you from lagging due to a lack of motivation.
  • Time-conscious goals give you a time frame to work within to achieve your goals.

Visit this site to read five smart goal examples for business development.

Need Some Customer Support Goals? Visit This Site!

On Happy Fox Blog, there are some great client support goals you can use to align with your company’s OKRs to improve productivity, increase efficiency, boost employee morale, and set attainable goals. Client support needs to receive the backing of the entire team to become successful in the business world.

Source: CommBox

Meet your daily targets

Every day you need to find small victories to propel yourself forwards to the ‘big win’ of reaching your main objective. However, we all know that meeting daily targets isn’t easy – sometimes the day gets away from us and we find ourselves behind on our work. This happens with client support too. In this case, your customer service representatives need to be flexible and deal with high-pressure situations.

Agents who hit their daily targets no matter what comes in their way are valuable team players who need to be protected moving forwards. Set service level agreements and measurable metrics to determine which team members are overachieving and underachieving.

Visit this site to see some examples of customer experience OKRs!

Improve customer satisfaction

Client satisfaction affects the entire organization. Happy clients are more likely to increase your client retention numbers, while simultaneously saying good things to the general public about your brand and image. Therefore, customer satisfaction is a top priority in your business.

Make sure you set quantifiable goals to meet industry benchmarks, measure satisfaction, and build better relationships with your clients. Visit this site to read some customer success OKR examples.

Source: Keka

Reduce your service delivery time

Have you ever been on hold on the phone for 15 minutes? How about one hour? What are the chances you hang up and never call back again? We would guess quite high. Customers rate speed as one of the most important attributes in client support. If you get your question answered within a few minutes, you are much more likely to trust that corporation with your issues and concerns.

Using OKRs like ‘reduce the wait time to within 5 minutes’ or ‘reduce the wait time by 10%’ is imperative to your client service agents’ effectiveness. Make sure the goals are time-restrictive so that your employees can measure their success against a concrete number.

Lower support costs

Unfortunately, customer support teams are usually one of the first sections of a business to succumb to budget cuts and lower amenities when compared to other sectors. You might have goals, OKRs, objectives, and important steps to achieve in your company – but you also have a budget to adhere to.

Reducing costs and lowering the support necessary is directly related to improving the efficiency of your customer support team. Make sure your sales reps are trained in all areas that can be questioned on the phone, and use self-service automated systems whenever necessary to fix minor issues.

Visit this site to gain inspiration from some support and customer service OKR templates to help client satisfaction.

Source: Cox BLUE

Improve agent satisfaction

Your customer service agents are the backbone of the client service sector of your business. Agent satisfaction may not help drive the sales in your corporation, but it is crucial to creating a good rapport between you and your employees, your employees and the general public, and the employees themselves.

If you call client support and speak to an unpleasant person who is unwilling to help you, there is very little chance you will stick with that company in the future. However, if someone is excited to help you and works tirelessly to solve your issue, the client retention rate will skyrocket.

Visit this site to see 10+ questions to ask clients after a customer service interaction to increase client retention and satisfaction.

Conclusion

Customer service is an often-overlooked sector of many businesses in today’s world. Although sales, marketing, value-delivery, and finance take the front seat, client service is a critical part of retaining clients, improving satisfaction levels, and selling products. Visit this site to see data-backed reasons as to why customer service is key to your business!