- Many organizations use a number of metrics
to evaluate customer service and overall performance.
These metrics might include customer satisfaction,
productivity, or even revenue.
Goals can be an important signal to employees
about what to focus on and how to prioritize their work.
The danger is some goals can push employees away
from the customer service vision rather than towards it.
Here's an example of what I'd call a bad goal.
Customer service reps who earn an average
customer satisfaction survey score of 90% or higher
during the month will earn $100.
At first glance, you might think this is okay.
The company wants employees to earn
high marks from customers
and is willing to offer an incentive
to encourage employees to achieve it.
So what could go wrong?
Here's what happened with this company.
Employees would transfer angry
or even mildly upset customers to a coworker
so they could avoid getting any negative survey results.
This improved their survey average
while sticking their coworker with an angry caller
that made it difficult for that person to earn the bonus.
Meanwhile, the customer was inconvenienced
by an unnecessary transfer.
Goals are an important part of doing business.
We just need to make sure the goals we set
encourage the right behaviors.
Let's look at the difference between good goals
and bad goals.
Good goals focus attention on the customer service vision
while bad goals divert attention away from it.
So a goal for a particular
customer service survey score can be good,
but we need to focus on using the survey
for continuous improvement.
Good goals promote teamwork
while bad goals reward individualism.
Employees transferred angry callers to coworkers
when they were concerned about their individual score.
Another company set a team goal for the survey score
and this promoted much more cooperation
and problem solving between employees
and even different departments.
Finally, good goals rely on intrinsic or internal motivation
while bad goals rely on
extrinsic motivation like incentives.
Here's something I've learned
from many years in customer service
and the research backs this up.
Most employees really do want to help their customers.
When you introduce an incentive
like earning $100 for getting a good survey score,
employees tend to shift their focus on earning the prize
and lose focus on why they should be doing it.
So here's an example of what a good goal might look like.
The team will earn an average
customer satisfaction survey score of 90% or higher
by the end of the month.
There's still a danger of employees
getting too focused on the score.
One customer service leader I know
discusses survey results with her team on a daily basis.
She helps them see beyond the score
to focus on what they are doing well to delight customers.
She also helps the team examine any problems
the survey reveals so those can quickly be fixed.
I encourage you to use the good goal criteria
to set at least one goal
that's aligned with your customer service vision.
You can download the Good Goal Worksheet to help you out.
Goals are an important part of measuring our success.
We can use goals to help create a strong culture
if our goals measure success in the right way.