Setting goals is vital for customer service success.
Setting individual customer service goals remains one of the most beneficial methods of improving the performance of a representative that struggles to complete his job responsibilities. Multiple goals or a wide range of goals makes it difficult for a representative to focus and improve. This generally results in a poor customer experience and an increase in employee attrition. Specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time-based goals that are narrow in focus help to drive consistent performance and a higher level of goal achievement.
Instructions
1. Analyze the representative's statistics for the current month and the last three months. Inspect for overlapping statistical trends that the representative struggles with. For example, many companies measure the customer's opinion via customer surveys and they measure the representative's performance via an internal scoring system. If the customer and the company both feel the representative struggles with offering concern to the customer, a focus on concern has the ability to move multiple metrics in a positive direction. Therefore, you get more improvement from the same level of coaching.
2. Observe multiple customer interactions or refer to documented feedback that was given to the representative over the last three months. Look for and identify trends that correlate to the identified metric that the representative struggles the most in. Again, for example, if the representative struggles with concern, the most impacting behavior might be that he overlooks negative statements the customer makes about their services.
3. Formulate an action plan that clearly defines one objective for the representative to focus on. For example, the action step could be to focus on actively listening for customer frustration and respond appropriately to the customer. This is specific to the needs and will help the representative understand exactly what is expected of him. Document examples of what this might sound like to the representative.
4. Define the level of improvement you expect to see and define the time frame for improvement. For example, if your company measures concern on a scale of one to five, with three being the business standard, and the rep has consistently delivered sub-business standard results, set the expectation that the representative must reach the business standard goal within two weeks. This is measurable, obtainable and has a realistic time frame for improvement.
5. Draft a document that has all relevant information on it. Include the goal, examples, expected metric improvement and the time frame. Have the representative post their action plan in her seating area where she can easily see it and have her bring the action plan to all scheduled coaching sessions.
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