SMART goals for customer service should be granular, comprehensive, and unambiguously phrased, especially if they require multiple steps.
The key is to proactively address questions your customer service agents might have after you communicate the goal, for example:
- Who is responsible for working toward the goal?
- What resources should we use to reach this goal?
- Which methods should we use to reach the goal?
- Why work toward this goal?
- What obstacles or challenges will we need to overcome?
- What’s the deadline?
By thinking through the questions your team may ask, you will create a detailed roadmap for accomplishing the goal, which is far more valuable than pointing your employees in the general direction of an outcome with little instruction on how to get there.
For example, you may have directed your team to meet customer expectations. It’s a great goal, but it’s not specific.
A SMART goal would focus on the element of customer experience you want to improve, for example, decreased average resolution time. After you have thought through achieving this goal, you may create a chatbot to answer simple customer queries, allowing your agents to address complex issues more quickly.
Following the SMART system, you would also explain why you’ve set this goal, for example, to increase customer satisfaction and retention, how to overcome obstacles, like a long queue building up for a particular agent, and the date you want to see improved response time numbers.