If you’re a business owner, there is absolutely no doubt that you are continuously searching for new ways to improve the experience for your customer base.
Whether it means hiring a new team of customer service representatives, making sure that your website is as easy and intuitive as possible, or simply improving the experience for people when they come into your store.
However, even if you know of ways to improve the customer experience for your business, you may still have trouble actually using that information to encourage positive change. Luckily, one of the best ways to achieve your ideal situation when it comes to all of the crucial aspects of customer service and experience is setting the right goals.
When it comes to setting goals, one of the best ways to do so in business is by using OKRs. See examples here of how OKRs improve the customer experience.
What are OKRs?
Before we break down how OKRs can help you improve your business’ customer experience, we should quickly break down what OKRs are.
Objectives and Key Results is a method that businesses have used for many years in order to create and track pre-set goals. OKRs tend to be heavily focused on specific goals and are usually time-restrictive.
OKRs can be related to either tangible goals – such as improving sales volume, or intangible goals – such as improving customer experience.
They are heavily useful thanks to the Key Results aspect of the strategy. These Key Results are ways that you can measure and keep track of how far along the journey to achieving the goals that you and your team have set. Key Results should be objective and measurable, meaning they are not up for debate and everyone will be on the same page at all times.
OKRs are a way for businesses to break free from the day-to-day slog of running a business and focus on the bigger picture and more advantageous goals.
How to set OKRs for your business’ customer service goals
If you are interested in creating OKRS related to the customer experience for your company, you are going to make sure that your objectives are highly specific, measurable, time-bound and also realistic (while remaining lofty).
Here are some quick tips on how to set Objectives best:
- Specific goals should be direct and to the point
- They should be easy to understand and measure in terms of quantitative or qualitative data
- They should reflect the company’s overall success
- Your goals should always be within the realm of possibility. No matter how lofty they are, you should always make sure that they are achievable
- Realistic goals will help your team remain committed and level-headed while not getting discouraged by a lack of momentum towards an impossible task
- If you are interested in setting time-specific goals, you should make sure that the timeframe that you want is both realistic and will also be advantageous to the overall success of your company
Some specific Objective examples for customer experience improvement
Companies that commit fully to OKRs will spend quite a lot of time focusing on what they should actually set their Objectives to be. One really beneficial aspect of this is that it often encourages business owners and managers to take a step back and look at the big picture.
With that being said, if you are looking for some ideas to get the ball rolling, continue reading to consider some of the most popular OKRs related to customer service and experience for companies across all industries.
Reduce your service delivery time
One great Objective to start with that will have an instant impact on the way that your customers see your company is to reduce delivery time for people hoping for service from your company. Without a doubt, people get really tired when they have to wait on the phone for 15, 30, 45 minutes or even more just to get a question answered on a product that they have purchased or a service that they are interested in receiving.
Use an OKR such as “reduce the wait time to within five minutes” or “reduce customer wait time by 15 percent.”
One thing with this OKR idea is that the goals and the key results should be time-related so that everyone on your team can easily see whether or not your team is meeting this new goal.
Improve customer satisfaction
Another highly popular way to improve customer experience is to look for a measurable improvement of customer satisfaction. Of course, in order to do this, you will have to set up a way – either through an automated phone call, questionnaire on your site, or emailed questionnaire – to encourage customers to report their satisfaction.
However, if you already have that, or know how to set that up, then you can easily measure which way the numbers are trending.
Happy clients and customers are far more likely to become return customers while also saying good things about your business in the outside world – improving your brand and image.
One great way to actually encourage customers to offer their insight into their experience with your company is to offer incentives, such as free shipping or a promotional code if they do fill out a small questionnaire related to their overall experience. From there, you and your team will be able to easily track whether the results from that questionnaire show an improvement in how customers feel their experience went after dealing with your company.
Improve agent satisfaction
Not all OKRs have to deal with external success. OKRs can easily deal with how things are operating within the company as well. In fact, some of the most impactful OKRs will deal with company morale, culture and other really important things.
One OKR related to customer service that is internal can be making sure that your customer service agents are satisfied in their job and happy in their work. Happy agents mean more helpful agents, and making sure that they are excited to work for your company, your customer service is going to skyrocket.
