How to set customer service goals (+9 example goals)

Improving customer service starts with setting goals. Customer service goals are not only important for setting expectations with your customer support team but also for measuring progress and performance as well.

Here are a few more reasons why setting customer service goals is important:

• Team alignment: Goals ensure that everyone in the organization is on the same page and clear direction can encourage employees to work more autonomously.

• Accountability: By clearly defining expectations and responsibilities, employees can be confident in the part they play in working towards achieving the goals.

• Insight into areas for improvement: Setting goals for customer service can help you identify opportunities or gaps in your customer experience process if you aren’t reaching them.

• Expectation management: As mentioned, setting service goals helps manage customer expectations across a company, keeping the brand tone consistent across all channels. It also establishes clear standards for response times, service quality, and problem resolution.

If you’re trying to deliver exceptional service, it's not enough to just identify service goals. Brands need to prioritize both implementation and measurement to ensure progress toward customer service goals.

Using the SMART framework can help give structure to your goals. This methodology keeps your objectives specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

• Specific: Clearly define what you want to achieve with your customer service efforts. Instead of a vague goal like "improve customer satisfaction," specify the aspect you want to target. Consider goals like "reduce average resolution time for customer inquiries by X time," which can be easily tracked by agents and managers.

• Measurable: Establish metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) to quantify goal progress and success. For example, you can measure customer satisfaction using a survey-based metric like CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) or NPS (Net Promoter Score), along with other customer experience metrics that provide deeper insights into service quality.

• Achievable: Set goals that are challenging but realistic. Consider factors like available resources, team capabilities, and potential obstacles. Your customer service team must believe all goals are attainable to maintain high motivation and commitment levels.

• Relevant: Your customer service goals should also align with your brand’s most important current business objectives. For example, if the company's goal is to increase market share, customer service goals should focus on improving customer retention rates to support that objective.

• Time-bound: Outline a clear timeframe for achieving your customer service goals. This could be quarterly, annually, or within a specific project timeline. Setting deadlines creates a sense of urgency and helps keep the team focused on meeting objectives.

Here’s an example of how one organization might measure a customer satisfaction goal using the SMART framework:

• Specific: Reduce the average response time for customer inquiries via email by 30%.

• Measurable: Track the average response time using contact center software and aim for a reduction of 30% compared to the previous quarter.

• Achievable: Review current response time data to ensure a 30% reduction is feasible with your company’s available resources, employee bandwidth, and technology.

• Relevant: Improving response time aligns with the company's objective of enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty, ultimately contributing to business growth.

• Time-bound: Work to complete this 30% reduction in average response time within the next six months.

The SMART framework provides clear, concise goals that help employees identify their exact responsibilities in the customer service process. These goals can include specific improvements in helping ticket response times, customer satisfaction scores, buyer retention, and overall issue resolution.

Your customer service goals should correlate closely to your company’s overarching goals. Each goal should be clearly defined, not only when first introduced to leadership but also during regular goal review meetings. Here are some customer experience goal examples to consider implementing:

Businesses' main goal in providing customer service is to increase customer satisfaction, which can naturally lead to customer loyalty, repeat purchases, and positive word-of-mouth referrals. Providing consistent, reliable service across all touchpoints helps to enhance the overall customer experience.

Every customer service experience is a chance to learn, both for the customer and the company. To increase overall customer satisfaction, begin with getting feedback from customers on the quality of the service they received. Then, audit customer service agent behavior, messaging, and any actions that might affect the customer experience. This helps you tailor your customer service strategies to improve your CSAT score.

A thorough customer onboarding process often helps to address questions that customers eventually have about products or services. Whether your brand sells physical products or SaaS solutions, make education a priority during onboarding. Provide new customers with answers to commonly asked questions and make your customer service agents available to address any issues that might arise in the days after onboarding.

Improving your customer onboarding process has benefits beyond customer satisfaction. Education during customer onboarding can lead to higher engagement levels and better product adoption. It also creates opportunities for your team to showcase additional features or benefits of a product or service suite, opening the door for potential upsells or add-ons over time.

One great way to improve your customer onboarding process is to ask for feedback early and often. Collecting customer feedback throughout the onboarding process — instead of waiting until a customer is fully onboarded — gives customers a chance to review your brand from day one. This allows you to refine every stage of your customer acquisition and retention process, from onboarding to cultivating satisfaction over time.

Modern consumers want instant gratification now more than ever. Whether they’re an existing customer troubleshooting an issue or a potential customer seeking answers about your products and services — it’s essential to get back to them as soon as possible. Focusing on decreasing your first response time can help with this.

Even if you can’t respond with a complete answer right away, acknowledging it’s on your radar goes a long way. When you respond promptly to a customer, you confirm they aren’t being ignored. In the example above, Shopify follows up in a timely manner and asks for additional information while personally acknowledging the customer to emphasize they want to help.

Here are a few ways to provide quicker responses:

• Use customer service software to stay on top of mentions

• Start by acknowledging the request; don’t wait until you have a solution

• Use automated responses with the help of customizable templates or AI

It’s important to strike the right balance between providing exceptional customer service and staying within your budget. You wouldn’t want the cost of supporting customers to be more than what your customers are paying you. To calculate your cost per contact, divide the total cost of providing support (labor, tools, other costs) by the number of contacts received.

Customer service agents have many tools at their disposal for reducing costs per contact. Here are a few common strategies they might use:

• AI chatbots can provide answers to basic customer questions without the need for a human agent.

• Use contact center technology to prioritize customer outreach, allowing agents to address the most urgent support requests first.

• Implement monitoring to identify areas where agents can improve their communication cadence with customers.

If you aim to reduce your company’s average cost per customer contact, tracking those costs is important. Ensure you have tools to measure the time, energy, and money your organization spends while addressing customer concerns. Your customer service team should also understand how to calculate average cost per contact rates based on total spend, total customers satisfied, and total agents online.

Customers today engage with brands across a wide range of digital channels. In one week, a single customer might interact with your brand in all of the following ways:

• View your company's updates on social media.

• Correspond with your customer support staff via phone, email, or direct messaging.

• Join online communities to discuss relevant company updates.

• Navigate your website or mobile application.

• Look for details about your brand's products or services across multiple search engines.

If your brand still has limited support offerings across channels or makes it difficult for customers to switch channels during their requests, creating a goal around a new or better omnichannel strategy should be a priority for your brand. Airbnb is an excellent example of successfully offering customer support across multiple channels, utilizing online communities, a self-service help center, and dedicated social media support platforms with the help of Khoros Service.

If you’re not sure how to create a great omnichannel experience, Khoros customer service can help you with the process. The software seamlessly integrates all of your channels, making it easy for agents to track interactions from channel to channel without switching between platforms or requiring customers to repeat information.

Customers hate waiting, especially if they’re being bounced from agent to agent with no end in sight. Beyond the initial response, reducing customer wait times throughout the support process is a great goal for brands to work on constantly.

Here are a few ways to actively reduce customer wait times:

• Offer asynchronous support so customers aren’t stuck on hold or in chat sessions.

• Provide options for callbacks when support is available.

• Utilize self-service options like AI chatbots, FAQs, and online community forums to handle common requests.

• Collect basic information and software to route customers to the channel best suited for their request, decreasing overall resolution times and freeing up agents.

Some organizations also lean on sales and service speed data to predict when customer service agents are the most in demand. By identifying peak hours when customer support is most required, they can staff customer service departments accordingly to keep wait times as low as possible.

The average person spends 3 hours and 15 minutes on their phone each day and 1 in 5 smartphone users spends around 4.5 hours on their phones every day. To accommodate the growing prevalence of mobile usage, every brand should have some form of mobile-friendly customer support.

Consider setting a goal to improve your customer service for people using mobile devices, including people requesting support through your brand’s mobile website, social media, and an app if you have one. Ensure you offer mobile support options and have a good user experience, which means buttons, fonts, and page layouts that are easy to navigate on a mobile device.

Automated options can help further reduce contact costs and improve productivity. For example, a company with an AI chatbot can allow customers to check the status of an order without contacting customer support. The same features also enable customers to make changes to a reservation, reschedule a meeting, or access an owner’s manual without needing a human agent.

If your brand isn’t already utilizing AI and automation to help with customer service, consider creating a goal around implementing a solution. For example, you could start by identifying processes that can be automated or supported by AI, then establish a goal to find a solution that will fulfill those needs and implement it by a target date.

As we’ve touched on throughout this article, self-service customer support allows customers to find answers without any direct involvement from your customer service team. For customers reaching out with simple questions, self-help resources like an AI chatbot can help resolve problems in a fraction of the time.

Self-help resources like Adobe’s can cover common requests, allowing your customer support team to focus on more strategic tasks. 

A good ongoing customer service goal should be to expand and refine self-service solutions. Continuously create new self-service resources and revise existing content to ensure it’s updated and helpful for audiences. While this can require a lot of work, brands can also create an online community that will organically populate with self-service information as users organically build a knowledge base of questions and answers from their interactions.

With Khoros Service, you can manage and integrate any customer support channel through our

digital contact center to meet modern customer service needs. AI-powered self-service features help your customers find answers without agent involvement while omnichannel workflows surface necessary information for your customer support team to seamlessly handle always-on-support across multiple channels.

Our digital-first contact center also provides deep insights into the customer service metrics that matter most with unified analytics helping you track SLAs and KPIs, the customer journey, and agent performance. 

Request a demo today to learn more about how Khoros Service can help you reach and measure your customer service goals.