When Kat moved into her new apartment, she called her internet provider, Spectrum, to move her service to her new residence. The technician didn’t show up the day and time he was supposed to. After registering a complaint, the technician finally arrived an hour and a half late from when he was supposed to show up. The main office was closed by then, so the technician could not access the necessary network.
The company didn’t send out another technician for another ten days, as they were fully booked. In total, it took Kat 15 days to switch her wifi network from one residence to another. The brand initially promised simple and painless services. The horror doesn’t end here. Kat did not want to pay for the 15 days that she had spent without the internet. After much hassle, the customer service department agreed to prorate her bill. Again, the company failed at this too. They charged her for those 15 days too. When she asked the customer support rep to dig into the situation, they denied that they had ever offered to prorate her bill and accused her of lying.
The result? Kat finally canceled her subscription with Spectrum services and switched to one of their competitors.
Bad move, Spectrum. Bad move!
Not only did they lose a customer, but they failed to retain the customer, increased their churn rate (as she opted for one of their competitors), and invited a whole lot of bad press. Especially if your customer is someone famous or an influencer on social media, you are in for a lot of trouble. Don’t believe me? See for yourself how an Indian comedian roasted their internet service provider for months after being tired of their slow-moving customer service.
Moral of the story: Every brand takes a loudspeaker about how exceptional their customer service is. But when it comes to action, most of them fail.
So, why does this happen?
Lack of Customer Service Objectives!
It is not rocket science to understand that companies, to elevate customer experience, must have specific values to stick to. These values/goals give them significant ownership and empower them with a voice at an exceptional level. Not having the correct values in place will make you the next Spectrum or Youbroadband. There are multiple reasons why I’ve been focussing on the importance of customer service (and objectives) for five minutes now. Let’s uncover these reasons together.
Customer Service Objectives: Simple Definition, Huge Advantage
Customer service is a lynchpin in the entire customer journey. Incidents of excellent customer service are not isolated events. Support agents depend on leadership that gives them the freedom to do the right thing over and over again.
By contrast, exceptional customer support is a revenue generator. So, if someone asks you, “what are your customer support goals?” what would your answer be?
- To help customers solve their problems
- Higher customer satisfaction
- Higher revenue
- Less resolution time
- Accurate resolutions
It is not wrong to have these things called your goals. These are the fundamental reasons to have a customer support team in place. They’re not really “goals.” But when you set out to define X different things in X different ways, things tend to go south. Customer support is rather a cocktail of various goals interlinked. So much so that having even one goal/objective out of the line would cost you a fortune.
10 Customer Support Objective to Strive for in 2021
Start with asking yourself, “How do you want to identify your brand?” and “What do you want your customer service’s USP to be?” For some brands, the goals might be as simple as answering customer queries on time, while for some, it would be delivering services before the due date. It will help you brainstorm the customer service objectives you should be setting for your niche.
Here are the customer service objectives that matter in 2021 (some matter more than others):
- Quicken Your Responses
- Standardize How You Measure Customer Service
- Customer Satisfaction
- Building Customer Loyalty
- Customer Retention
- Boost Customer Recovery
- Customer Empathy
- Increase Customer Lifetime Value
- Let Customers Reach You Easily
- Customer Centricity
Quicken Your Responses
Quick Facts:
- The average response time for companies on Facebook is 27 hours and 47 minutes.
- 85% of customers (on Facebook) expect a response from companies within six hours.
Pro Tip:
Social Media is a great place to start! Aim to get your responses out quicker than average on your social media pages.
Connect seamlessly with your customers easily. Manage all your channels from one place with DeskXpand.
Recommended Read: How to Reduce Customer Support Response Time
2. Standardize How You Measure Customer Service
One of the most defining questions while framing your customer service objectives is measuring your brand’s success and value. There are multiple ways to measure this. You need to identify metrics that matter the most to your niche. Create a plan and start measuring these metrics. It can be anything from familiar systems such as net promoter score (NPS), customer satisfaction score (CSAT), or other parameters.
3. Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is usually the most primary customer service objective for a company. It is the driving force behind all the achievements during the lifecycle of a business.
It would help if you defined what customer satisfaction means for your brand. You can do this by:
- Asking the customers what exactly they want
- Running regular customer surveys
- Sending feedback messages after query resolution
- Regularly analyzing your CSAT metrics
Before we move forward to the following customer service objectives, let me run you through a story—a story of a terrible customer service experience.
Recently, I had a frustrating incident at Burger King (India) after a long day at work. This is an in-store experience. At the time of payment, I offered to pay through my debit card. The executive swiped the card, and the payment was made only to find out that the machine wasn’t working.
So, I offered to pay through the Google Pay app (India) and eventually did. The transaction was successful! I had my food. But, minutes later, I found out that the money was debited twice, once from my debit card and another time from the Google Pay app. I went ahead and talked to one of the executives and asked them for a refund for one of the transactions. The manager asked me to wait for 4-5 working days and ensured that the money would be refunded.
Seven days hence, I did not receive any refund. So, I went to the store again. This time I talked to the manager. Rather than empathizing, the manager asked me to submit a bank statement to prove that the incident had taken place and that I wasn’t lying. Insane, right! The next day again, I went with the bank statement, and then after cross-checking with their servers, the manager finally (thankfully) refunded the amount.
Pretty exhausting, right? Guess who’s never going back to Burger King!
This brings me to the following four most crucial customer service objectives that companies need to focus on.
4. Building Customer Loyalty
Repeat after me: A customer will only return when they’re happy with the service.
In the above example, Burger King failed at building customer trust. I was a loyal customer to them for years, but imagine someone having a similar experience when they visit Burger King for the very first time. They won’t return!
You can offer all the upgrades and discounts, but nothing will work if their experience is terrible. Plus, this is directly proportional to customer retention.
5. Customer Retention
It takes more effort to retain customers than to acquire new customers. If you are not going to work on retention, your support costs will not pay off. So this is a must-have customer service objective.
Customer Retention Metrics That Matter
Behind every unhappy customer, there is a critical pain point that businesses need to catch and solve. You can identify these pain points and find relevant solutions to improve retention.
With DeskXpand intuitive customer service software, your business can measure the metrics that matter and offer delightful support every single day. DeskXpand’s exceptional helpdesk analytics helps businesses provide quick resolutions by measuring the metrics that matter and offer delightful solutions.
6. Boost Customer Recovery
Excellent customer support also involves converting unhappy customers into happy customers. You should take it as an opportunity and serve an outstanding experience so that the customer would stick by your brand.
You can use the customer recovery process as an opportunity to prove that the customers are valued. Be ready to give them some special perks and benefits of being your customers. Resolve issues in a friendly and diligent manner and ensure a good experience.
So, if Burger King were to offer me a free snack or a discount coupon, I’d consider forgiving them. 🙂
7. Customer Empathy
A company cannot be successful with an apathetic culture. With customer empathy, you can gain a competitive advantage. Ask your agents to put themselves in the shoes of the customers when working on queries.
An Amazon customer ordered a PlayStation for his son. When the package was delivered, the customer wasn’t home, and so a neighbor had signed for the delivery, who then left the package outside the customer’s door. Unfortunately, it disappeared. Well, Amazon was not to blame for this mistake. But they were quick to resolve this. They sent a new PlayStation in time for Christmas without charging the customer for extra shipping.
This is an excellent example of customer empathy. Rather than sticking to their refund policy, they chose to do good. And that is what matters!
8. Increase Customer Lifetime Value
Remember when I told you that most customer support objectives are interlinked. Well, the above four customer service objectives collectively work to improve the lifetime value of your customer.
The longer the customer lifetime value, the more your brand grows.
9. Let Customers Reach You Easily
Savvy businesses know that making customer support easily accessible helps create a better customer experience. Many businesses take this to mean adding more customer support channels to their repertoire, but that’s not always the answer.
Most importantly — make sure you’re on the right channels at the right time. One channel to consider adding to your list? Live chat. Biking distributor HLC used live chat to provide a better online customer experience while improving visibility into customer issues.
Recommended Read: 6 Tips to Implement Your Omnichannel Customer Experience
10. Customer Centricity
Customer-focused companies are 60% more profitable than companies that aren’t customer-centric. A customer-centric culture means putting the customer at its center and regulating its policies and workflows accordingly.
Most brand’s growth expectations directly equate to providing a better customer experience. Because excellent customer experiences automatically mean long-term customer retention. According to a study, customers who switch companies due to poor customer support cost $1.6 trillion (to U.S. companies.)
A customer-focused model is built to be agile and move with the changes and trends in customer demands. Hence this is one of the most important objectives that you must have on your list.
Enhance Customer Service With The Right Tech Partners
As per a study by Temkin Group, 77% of customers recommend a brand to their peers after a satisfactory customer service experience. And only strategic customer service objectives can help you reach on top.
If you intend to enhance your customer service objectives, then you can follow some tried and tested customer service strategies:
- Take feedback from customers
- Offer an omnichannel experience
- Strengthen your customer support teams
- Practice customer empathy
- Work on customer retention more than customer acquisition
- Work with the right technological partner.
Ready to set your customer service objectives?
Check out DeskXpand and rightfully claim what’s yours. Everyone deserves a feature-rich helpdesk!
Take a deep dive into customer expectations.
