Customer care, and customer care goals should really be among the top priority goals for any company, regardless of industry or demographic. This may be for many reasons, but most importantly its the core of the business.
I and many others have mentioned how important customer care and customer experience are to a company. This is especially important regarding interaction between the company and customer, such as through customer service, support or other scenarios. It is by these things which a company is judged for posterity, above and beyond quality of product or service. So, with customer care being as important as it is, there needs to be an ever evolving set of customer care goals forever being pursued by your company.
What are some good goals to set, and continue to raise the bar on? Well, to some degree, this depends on your business and your industry, as well as the state of your customer care at the time. However, there are some general goals that reach across all of these boundaries, and I think it’s time to mention these.
One of the biggest ongoing goals should be improvement of customer service and support, especially when it comes to call centers. First call resolution rates should forever be an unattainable, just beyond reach goal that continues to elevate as progress is made. Call centers are a nightmare, so making them quick and painless is always important.
Casual contact should be an ever-evolving goal in customer care as well. Casual contact is a rapport established between the company and the general public, not just professed customers. Social networks are a blossoming method and environment for this, where people can talk to the company and vice versa, without necessarily any issue at hand. Some companies are doing this right now.
Another goal should be to drive customer compliments skyward. The more positive feedback a company obtains, the better they are doing. It’s a bad idea to assume customers are complacent enough to not want to praise a company when satisfied. This is a viable metric on how well a customer experience a company is providing. Silence actually indicates a level of mediocrity in the eyes of some subset of the user base, not satisfaction.
Traditional marketing and business professionals love to argue otherwise, but recent studies and recent trends show this to be the case after all.
Finally, the most important of all customer care foals is that of word of mouth recommendation from customers. This basically is a less altruistic goal, but one very integral to customer care. Customers who recommend your company to those they like or whom trust them is a major praise to your company, and a sign that your customer care is good. Beyond this, though, it assigns a default value to your service, by association, that you’d not have going in otherwise.
So, as you can see, not all customer care goals are just about making the customer happy, despite it being the most important thing. There is a more immediate material gain to be had from these endless goals being set.
