Every business has goals that they aim to meet every quarter or every year. A lot of the time, those goals are financial: Hitting a certain number of sales, locking down a certain number of new clients, putting out a certain number of new products. But in order to run a successful business that earns new customers, grows at a steady pace and keeps current customers coming back, setting goals around the customer service you offer and the service experience and satisfaction of customers is absolutely crucial.

First off, specific goals will help keep the agents working in your call center engaged and motivated. Their day-to-day experience is separate from that of the employees working on your sales team, for example, so the sales goals likely don’t mean as much to them. But setting goals that they can relate to and work towards on a daily basis will give them an increased sense of accomplishment, forging a deeper connection between them and the work they are doing. The result: Better performance and less turnover among agents.

From there, the direct result of better agent performance is often increased customer satisfaction. Agents that have goals to work toward—especially if meeting those goals pays off for them in some way—will work harder to solve customer’s problems during calls. Once the customer service goals are clearly stated as the most important thing, agents will feel more empowered to do what it takes to meet them. That means they will listen more intently, be more creative in their problem solving, and be less likely to do things that lower customer satisfaction, such as placing them on hold for extended periods of time or transferring them to other departments unless absolutely necessary. Empowering agents and giving them more autonomy in their roles is also critical to decreasing agent turnover.

So, what sorts of customer service goals should you be setting? Your first should be about increasing the frequency of first call resolution by a metric that feels achievable for the size and experience of your team. Beyond first call resolution, you can choose goals that align specifically with your company’s other goals and the products you offer. You can also set goals to merely increase customer satisfaction, which you can measure via post-call surveys and by reviewing calls and reports afterward—a process that CallShaper’s reporting tools makes incredibly easy. To learn more about those tools, request a demo today.