How To Set SMART Goals For Customer Service?
“How much you can learn when you fail determines how far you will go into achieving your goals.”
— Roy T. Bennett
Setting a goal is the foremost step of any innovation or reform in businesses. Goals act as the base to the path leading towards growth, inculcating essential values like motivation, determination, and clarity of their tasks.
What are SMART goals?
S.M.A.R.T. is a helpful acronym guiding businesses in setting goals and objectives for important tasks like project management, employee performance management, and personal development.
S- Specific
Ensure your business goals are focused on catering to specific issues. There are a bunch of issues companies deal with and wish to overcome, but setting a goal that caters to the whole bunch will make the story go downhill.
Set categories, look for issues, put them in the laid out categories and then create goals specific to those problems and goals that do not overlap with each other making a fuss.
M- Measurable
To measure the growth, make sure there is a lucid method in place. The growth, the fall, the progress and the regress; you should be able to measure both in order to make necessary changes and edits with the passing time.
A- Attainable
To empower motivation and lead towards success, the goal should be attainable.
It spreads a negative and discouraging vibe when a specific goal is not achieved, leading to self-doubt. To avoid such scenarios, make sure your goals are attainable.
R- Relevancy
Relevancy of goals to your company’s value and brand image is important. Your goals should represent your company’s thoughts and the motive behind the defined goal.
T- Time-bound
Give yourself a timeline to achieve your goals—people like procrastinating and sometimes continue doing it despite their protestations.
So, if you want the team to be on the grind for your customer service goals, make sure you give them a deadline.
How SMART goals can benefit your customer service?
“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”
– Sam Walton – Travis Biggert
Customers are the ultimate king.
Businesses surpass extreme efforts to ensure customer delight. Customer support teams are proven to be the most important domain of businesses for the same reason. Empower your customer support teams to create consistent customer delight with SMART customer care.
Benefits of SMART customer goals:
- Gives you a vision of past victories for future.
- Assists you in visualizing and planning operations.
- Gives you direction to stay ahead.
- Set priorities to establish the direction
- Helps you examine reality by segmenting it.
- Gives you trustworthiness for its success or failure.
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It is pretty simple to develop an understanding of goal setting or comprehend the holistic approach of goal setting, but framing them in a single clear sentence and following goal-setting guidelines can be a daunting task. Also, it’s a lot time-consuming.
Let us look at a few but essential ways in which you can create a blend of challenging and achievable SMART customer service goals:
Look at one goal at a time
Customer service is a department of every business overwhelmed with expectations and a huge to-do list. To avoid chaotic situations and to overburden the customer service force, it is necessary to drive all your team’s focus on a single goal at a time.
Visual representation of your goals
Visualising your goals is a psychological technique that assists your mind in achieving your goals and living your dreams.
Visualise with the Mind Rehearsal technique. Picture yourself being inside of your mind; look out through your eyes at the desired goal.
The moment you visualise yourself imagining a specific goal, your brain interprets that visual as reality and creates new neural routes and possibilities to contribute to that actuality.
Involve your employees in brainstorming
The prominent performer of all your customer service strategies and applications is your employees at the end of the day. Involving them in the goal-setting process is a crucial aspect to maintain certainty in goal accomplishment.
They work at the ground level, interacting with customers and solving their queries; ergo, they have better insights into what issues need to be addressed. These insights will help you a lot in creating a customer-centric goal.
Break down larger goals into smaller subgoals
Businesses get highly ambitious and end up setting a large goal that will consume more time, more effort and deal with not just one problem but a set of problems. The comprehensiveness of such goals becomes difficult to define.
Breaking these large goals into smaller subgoals will make it plain sailing for the team to work in accordance to achieve them.
Be open for adjustment even after goals are set
Organisations get uncomfortable in changing or adjusting their goals once they are identified. There are various instances when certain important factors or customer issues are left unattended during goal setting.
Such instances demand adjustments, and you should always be open to such changes as these constant changes and additions will only make the goals more achievable.
Conclusion
Above mentioned points are some important ways in which you can ensure SMART goal setting for the customer service of your business.
If the concept of SMART goal setting still gives you an inch in your brain, then try out this practice where you pick any general issue of your business and create a goal around it. Then you can go through the SMART dictionary given at the beginning of this article and see if your goal adheres to those.
