On a quarterly or yearly basis, businesses come together to determine their objectives.
Setting goals to keep them on budget, ensuring inventory levels are sufficient and revenue targets are being met.
But what about customer experience goals?
One of the more telling aspects of a business’s success, setting goals for customer experience and measuring it is vital for improved operations and a more satisfied customer.
Helping to inform long-term revenue, in this blog, we’re exploring why experience goals are important and the 4 actionable ones you can set for your customer experience initiative.
Why You Should Create Actionable Goals
Having clearly defined goals keeps your business moving forward.
While you may have a general direction of where you’re going with experience, having defined numbers, projections and timelines can hold you and your team accountable.
From a growth perspective, it allows you to create and hit targets that you can use with stakeholders for future buy-in. It also helps keep your team aligned, if the goal is shared internally, employees will work towards it and functioning becomes much easier.
But, actionable goals don’t just happen, they’re carefully curated.
Specifically, SMART goals (Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Based) are what separates good goals from great ones. So while you’re reviewing the ones we set out in this blog, start to meditate on the idea of why it’s important, target numbers that are achievable at this moment, and when you intend to reach that goal. Let’s dive in.
4 Actionable Goals For Your Customer Experience Program
Goal #1: Customer Retention
While acquiring new customers is often a business’s main objective, retaining your current ones has actually proven to drive more revenue and improve brand reputation.
According to a report by Bain and Co., a 5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in company profit. Further, existing customers are also 31% more likely to spend more on their average order value with your business.
As opposed to making a one-and-done sale, customer retention is a sustainable goal for long-term revenue. When drafting this goal, make sure you get specific in the number of customers you hope to retain and by when.
Goal #2: Improve Employee Experience
According to Gallup, businesses that prioritize employee engagement have seen a 17% improvement in productivity and a 21% uptick in profitability.
Employee experience directly translates to a successful business and more satisfied customers. It makes sense, on a daily basis your employees are managing operations, talking about your product to customers, and engaging in service. Ensuring that they’re happy, energized and understood should be a top priority.
While carving out the details of this goal, remember that a thriving employee experience starts with inclusive teams, an understanding of employee sentiment, and steps to promote well-being. Try holding regular meetings to report on employee performance and provide feedback. If you can, consolidate data to back up business progress and recognize stellar performance. I’t also important to connect with employees during this time and understand sentiments; do they feel engaged? What can you improve? Having this insight can help you set more specific goals for the future.
Goal #3: Acquire New Customers
Just because retaining customers is more rewarding, doesn’t mean you have to give up on finding new ones.
Acquiring customers is a common but very necessary goal, as it’s essential for growth and helps you expand your reach. Requiring a greater understanding of the market and competition, it’s an opportunity to see how well you market your brand and how current customers are receiving it. This goal also helps understand emerging trends and customer preferences. While a loyal customer may select your brand for the continued excellent service, a new one might look for specific services or prices.
Goal #4: Improving Overall Service Delivery
According to a study by Microsoft, 69% of US consumers say customer service is very important when it comes to their loyalty to a brand.
Interactions between customers and employees are crucial. Employee attitude, knowledge and presentation of product or service, sticks with the customer and are telling of how you run your business.
Setting goals in relation to service and continuously measuring them can help you pinpoint moments to further explore. For instance; top performing employees, touchpoints where service levels drop, favoured products or services, and more.
A great way to keep track of this goal and improve service is by asking for regular customer feedback. Surveys are tremendously useful for gathering key insights on service experience.
Realizing Your Customer Experience Goals
As you begin to flesh out your goals and determine specific dates and progress statistics, considering a customer experience solution can help you actualize your objectives.
Moving to a digital solution, manual labour is minimized, data collection is automated and customized dashboards can help you visualize progress.
As an example, with the Loop Experience Platform, businesses can create actionable goals in platform, monitor their progress and export key data for presentations and board meetings. Where traditionally data is collected via paper – taking days, weeks or months to collect, a digital tool allows leadership teams to obtain real-time data on how business is performing.
If, for instance, you’ve developed a goal and set up a strategy but over the course of a few weeks you’re not seeing progress, you can easily make adjustments without losing valuable time.
Further, exporting findings is also an advantageous feature of a customer experience solution. As you make progress with your goals, you also want to be able to share them with others on the team, whether employees or stakeholders. Using the Loop Platform, you can export panels into PDF, PNG and JPEG files to add to presentations, or export them as CSV files to analyze the raw data. It’s as easy as customizing your dashboard to the data you need and sharing it with your team.
Looking to make the switch to a digital solution to measure the progress of your goals? Check out Loop Feedback, a unified solution to help you set actionable goals and measure each step in the customer’s unique journey.
