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How to Place the Customer First (and avoid the pitfalls)
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by
Kimberlee Meier
November 1, 2023
· Updated on
Think about a brand you love.
I don't mean a store you buy from every now and then. I mean a company you hold a freakin' torch for. You are loyal to them. And it'll take a lot for you to change to a competitor.
For me, it's Apple.
Cliché, I know. But that company has always been there for me. When I dropped my laptop on my way to a lecture at University a couple (okay, more like 15) years ago. When I email them. When I drop into a Genius Bar because my phone is glitching and I need to get on a flight. When a new product feature drops that improves my working day. They are there.
In my mind, Apple is the perfect example of a customer-first company. Every product they have produced has been for its customers, from iPods to watches. Heck, even Steve Jobs said it was his job to figure out what we want before we do.
This is the epitome of a customer-first approach. It's a brand that puts customers' needs first and fulfills them so well, they never shop anywhere else.
So, how does a customer-first strategy like this work?
Let's take a look 👇
Table of Contents
A customer-first culture means a company puts their customer base at the center of every decision—from product design to initiatives, marketing campaigns and support.
With a customer-first approach, every product, service, conversation, campaign, and interaction is designed around what the customer wants. By listening, taking on feedback, and putting customers first, you lay the foundation for long-term partnerships with your customers so they stick around.
The tough reality about a customer-first approach is to achieve it, your productivity or even your bottom line might take a hit. However, with 65% of customers surveyed in a Khoros study admitting poor customer experience caused them to switch brands—putting customers first is a strategy worth pursuing.
To figure out what this really meant and what a customer-first company really had to do to succeed, I dug a little deeper.
That's when I found Bloomberg's Customer Centricity Index. It rates the world's leading brands on their customer-centric approaches. You might just recognize some of the names that made the leaderboard:
So, how did they crack the top 100? 🤔
Well, each company was tested on eight factors:
Ticking all these boxes will score a company a slot at the top of the leaderboard. This checklist is a great foundation for what you should aim for if you want to turn your company into a customer-centric machine.
But before we dive into how to do that, let's take a detour and look at why a customer-first approach doesn't mean you should hand over control to customers.
Don't confuse a customer first strategy with a customer is always right strategy.
A customer-first strategy will build a bridge between what a customer needs and what your company can achieve. On the flip side, following a "customer is always right" strategy can lead you down a garden path where you try to meet every customer demand, even if it hurts your business.
Build a strategy to strike a balance between meeting customer needs and maintaining your own business objectives.
A customer-first strategy helps a business truly see its target customers and allows them to build out products and services they really need. It also helps improve customer retention and employee satisfaction because both parties are satisfied.
Let's break that down a little.
Great service can mold how customers spend money. A recent Zendesk study found a whopping 87% of customers changed their future buying behavior thanks to a good customer service experience.
It found they were more likely to purchase more products, recommend the company to other people, or even switch who they shopped with. Forbes also found brands that give customers a "super experience" reap the (cash) benefits and bring in 5.7x more revenue than competitors.
Apart from increased sales, a customer-first strategy can also:
A lot of these benefits are down to one thing: customer satisfaction. And most customers will pay more for an exceptional customer experience.
The days of closed-door innovation—when teams got in a room and figured out what to build or supply next—are over.
That's not a bad thing. Today's customers are more vocal and tell you exactly what they want from a product or service. All you have to do is listen. Monitor your social media channels and check online reviews to see what customers are saying and if they are asking for a product or upgrade they need.
Oh, and don't forget about asking your employees on the front line (like those in the customer support team) what they hear on the ground. Any nagging issues or suggestions from customers should be put into an internal shared document to follow up on. The sooner you act, the better.
This brings us to step two—getting feedback.
The most loyal customers aren't just happy—they've got their skin in the game.
Asking customers for feedback and acting on it is the best way to prove to customers that their voices are being heard. Set up feedback loops through surveys using tools like Tally, or trawl through customer reviews or social media posts to understand how your customers perceive your brand.
Maxie Schmidt is a Principal Analyst at Forrester. She recommends taking a look at whether this process is measurement-obsessed or customer experience-obsessed using this chart:
Obviously, you want to be on the right side of the chart (no pun intended.)
Just look at how Starbucks gets feedback from customers.
Ever tried a pumpkin spice latte? If so, you have mystarbucksidea.com to thank. The site was launched over 15 years ago to give customers a platform to share and vote on ideas to improve their Starbucks experience. It wasn't pretty, but it worked:
Customers posted over 150,000 ideas on how to improve Starbucks on the platform, and nearly 300 of them were brought to life. And even though the mystarbucksidea.com site has been wound down, it showed thousands of customers the brand wasn't just willing to listen, but their ideas were good enough to use in-store.
The takeaway here is simple. Actively address customer feedback and use it to drive trust in your brand.
A good product fit can only get you so far. If your post-sale support sucks or customers don't feel appreciated, there's a risk they will churn to a competitor.
Make the effort to connect with customers on a 1-on-1 basis whenever you get the chance. Whether it's replying to an email or a comment on social media, a personal interaction will always score points. It also shortens the feedback loop and you can instantly solve a problem or take a great idea back to your team instead of wading through surveys.
He may be controversial, but Elon Musk is (very) visible on social media and makes the effort to reply to customers about concerns they have with Tesla. Look at how he replied to this comment about electric vehicle charging stations:
You're right, this is becoming an issue. Supercharger spots are meant for charging, not parking. Will take action.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2016
This showed the customer that his feedback mattered and action would be taken immediately. It's a great example of showing your customer you care.
Finally, equip your team with the tools they need to successfully implement a customer-first strategy.
Talk about what a customer-first culture will look like at your company and make sure your team is on the same page. Then, set some goals for them to hit:
It's also a good idea to put all your data under one roof. Use a customer relationship management (CRM) software to collect and store customer data. That way, if your team needs to get up to speed on a customer or look at recent feedback—it's all in one place.
Not all companies are customer first. But those who have adopted this strategy have learnt how listening to what their customers want can pay off.
Here are two examples of companies that have used this strategy to improve customer experience. 👇
You may have to pay an extra couple of bucks, but you can now take your pet in an Uber.
Before the feature launch, individual drivers could decide whether or not a cat, dog, bird, or any non-human was allowed in their car. For customers with pets, this led to an awkward (and sometimes heated) standoff where they had to message their Uber driver to make sure the ride would be accepted.
After a ton of feedback from customers in certain areas like Hong Kong and Germany, Uber decided to launch a dedicated option to order a pet-friendly ride.
This change accomplished two goals. It gave a subsection of Uber customers a feature they asked for. Plus, it cut out the annoying (and awkward) messages between customers and drivers about whether a pet was allowed in the vehicle or not.
Talk about a win-win!
Lionize is a SaaS software platform built to simplify the lives of marketers. It serves thousands of influencers every day along with the brands that work directly with the company.
But there was a problem. The Lionize team was juggling a ton of influencer and client communications and its team… couldn't keep up. Influencers were left hanging and waiting for a reply, and Lionize's brand partners were also leaving money on the table.
Eddie Dalrymple, Senior Account Executive at Lionize, said it was really difficult to organize communication channels as they were all over the place. For example, the team is sending emails to influencers, but they might get a reply via text.
"It was really difficult for us to manage a Gmail inbox, and also manage a Twilio number which was what we were doing originally. We needed a way to group all communication together to be more organized when reaching out to these influencers", he said.
"It's difficult to check that a person emailed us but we sent them a text an hour ago, and you get these mismatches in communication."
Lionize knew it wasn't replying to its influencers' emails and texts quickly enough. So, the company set a goal to reply to each influencer within 48 hours. And they hit it.
The company started using Missive (our team inbox and chat app) to keep communications under one roof and reply strategically. The best part is anyone can reply to an influencer when an email lands in an inbox, as they can see the last 10 conversations and get up to speed on where they are at.
Since Lionize prioritized putting its customers first and (dramatically) improving its communication, it has cut response times and most importantly given its clients a better service. 🥳
Want to join Lionize (and 3000+ businesses) and put your customers first? Missive is a team inbox and chat app rolled into one to help your team truly collaborate. Take it for a free test drive here!
May 14, 2025
6 Ways to Use AI in Your Email Inbox
In a world where new AI tools are releasing every day, we're going to share some practical ways to use AI within email and your inbox.
AI and email management go hand in hand.
There are AI tools dedicated to helping you clean your inbox (like SaneBox) and plenty that help you draft emails better and/or faster.
In a world where new AI tools are releasing every day, we're going to share some practical ways to use AI within email and your inbox.
At the end of each section, we'll cover some of the best AI email tools and AI assistants that can help you be more efficient in your inbox—whether you're a Gmail or Outlook user.
Here at Missive, our users get a lot of emails—100+ in a day in some cases. We crowdsourced the most practical, helpful AI suggestions that real businesses are using to maintain a clutter-free, productive inbox.
Before we jump into the examples, these are the three broad buckets where AI is used within inboxes:
For cleaning emails, there is usually a deep purging functionality (i.e., archive all emails before a certain date) as well as a new system to keep your inbox clean after the purge (i.e., auto-categorization into folders/labels). SaneBox is a great example of this bucket.
For drafting and writing emails, you can create prompts that take into consideration your writing style, structure, and tone and add in resources for AI to pull context from—most commonly, your knowledge base or website.
For kicking off other tasks—this is the most exciting part of AI within your inbox. Certain tools (like Missive's AI-powered rules) allow you to automate a set of actions based on the context of an email. Imagine every email gets assigned to the right people, a set of tasks is created, a label or folder is applied, and an entry is made in your CRM—without a single human interaction. That’s magic!
Let's get to the AI-powered magic.
We're highlighting Missive's AI-powered rules in the examples below, but you can create your own AI email automations with your favorite tools, and we include some recommendations.
Here are the 6 best AI email workflows.
Our inboxes get inundated every day, but not every email deserves equal attention. A clean inbox needs a system of categorization.
Historically, you could set up automations based on sender, message content, etc.—but now with AI, you can understand the context of emails, which changes email management entirely.
It's like having an AI assistant read each email and then categorize it based on the context within. It's far more robust than just looking at the sender domain.
If you don't already have some form of auto-labeling, auto-folder categorization, or archiving automation running, here are a few examples to get you started:
By auto-filing certain emails out of your inbox using AI, you'll be able to focus on the ones that need your attention. And when you have some free time, you can visit your newsletter label to catch up on industry insights.
Most modern email clients have some version of this built in. If you're looking for an add-on tool for Gmail or Outlook, we cover those below as well.
Missive — Inbox collaboration for teams
Superhuman — Great for keyboard shortcut lovers
Shortwave — For an AI-first inbox
SaneBox — AI email organizer that integrates with your existing client
Unroll.me — Alternative to SaneBox, bulk email cleaner for any provider
AI can save time inside your inbox—but using it to trigger external workflows is where the magic really happens.
Example: A real estate business receives emails from both buyers and sellers in a shared inbox. Their workflows are completely different, so we used AI to identify the intent and trigger specific assignments, tasks, and summaries for the right team members.
If you have different workflows depending on the email, you can use AI to detect the context and automate accordingly.
Relay.app — AI-first workflow builder
Zapier — Classic builder, now with AI
Missive — AI rules built into the collaborative inbox
Inbox maintenance is like pruning a tree—it requires regular attention.
With AI clients, workflow builders, or Missive rules, you can automatically clean up emails without manually clicking "unsubscribe."
Set it up narrowly (specific senders or domains) or broadly (based on open behavior, like emails unread for 30+ days).
Solutions like SaneBox include versions of this, though some manual training may be required.
Say you run an accounting firm where each client has a dedicated team and inbox.
Most messages are about invoices, but occasionally, an urgent email from the CEO arrives that needs management's attention.
AI can identify urgency and escalate the message automatically to the right person.
Other tools can do this too—but may require you to create specific folders/labels and rely on manual monitoring.
This works best if you have a large, public knowledge base or help center that the AI can reference. If you do, you can use one of the newer AI models that allow you to search the web.
Here's the prompt we use at Missive for our support team:
You are an expert customer support specialist for Missive, the collaborative team inbox platform. Your job is to draft accurate, empathetic, and clear replies to customer inquiries based only on official Missive documentation.
Note: Keep all responses strictly tied to Missive's documented functionality.
Now, if you want to get crazy with it. You can create an automation where a draft is created every time an incoming email fits a specific criteria. And you can use AI to help you determine which email triggers the automation.
Don't want to pay for contact enrichment tools? Use AI to summarize new prospects.
It adds context directly to the email thread, so you can start conversations better informed.
For more robust enrichment, tools like Clay or CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce offer AI-powered data collection.
We hope these ideas help you clean emails, draft faster, and automate smarter.
All the tools mentioned above offer a “fresh start” feature to deep clean your inbox and begin anew.
Whether you're using SaneBox with your current client or switching to an AI-first inbox—there's no reason your email shouldn’t flow to the right people and places automatically after setting a few AI-powered rules.
If you're looking for an AI-powered email client uniquely designed for teams—give Missive a try. No credit card needed, and our free trial includes access to AI rules.
February 5, 2024
How to Set Customer Service Goals for Success
Learn how to set customer service goals for success
When I took over the customer service team at my last company, it was during a period of transition.
We’d just gone through an acquisition which, although welcome, meant we needed to reassess our resources, our tools, and our team’s strategy for the foreseeable future. I was also stepping from a senior role into a management role, and while neither management nor the team were new to me, the situation was changing quickly.
This presented a challenge: quickly leading the team through setting new expectations and requirements, while still delivering the same excellent customer service experience for our customers.
It also gave us an opportunity to move from good to great — by understanding where we were, where we wanted to go, and how we might get there.
Maybe you’ve also just taken over a new team, or you’re also going through an acquisition or reorganization. Or maybe you’re just looking to level up your support team.
Regardless of why you’re here, this article will help you understand what SMART goals are in the context of customer service and how to define SMART customer service goals for your team. It includes some examples of great customer service goals, and it will show you how to measure the success of your goals so your team can continue to grow and adjust your customer service strategy as needed.
Table of Contents
Being on a ship with no destination is unpleasant and nerve-wracking for everyone aboard.
Setting solid customer service goals for your team provides a common purpose and keeps everyone moving in the same direction. It improves your odds of reaching your destination: consistent excellent customer service.
And beyond the psychological benefits of having clear goals, there are plenty of more tangible benefits too.
Clear customer service goals ensure that your team’s efforts align with the broader objectives of the company, so it’s clear how your team is contributing to business growth.
It also means both you and the company can make more informed decisions about budget and resource allocation, using the real data and trends you glean from measuring your progress against your goals.
Goals focused on customer satisfaction directly contribute to improving the overall customer experience. Satisfied customers are more likely to be loyal, to make repeat purchases, and to recommend your business to others.
Consistently meeting and exceeding your customer service goals also builds your company’s reputation for reliability and trustworthiness, which is essential for long-term brand success.
Setting specific goals and measuring how each member works toward these objectives allows customer service teams and managers to identify strengths and weaknesses. It also allows individual team members to understand and direct their own professional development.
Well-defined goals also provide teams with a clear sense of direction and purpose. Team members who understand how their work contributes to larger goals are happier and more committed to the company’s success.
You’ve probably heard of SMART goals before. It’s a handy mnemonic tool that reminds everyone that effective goals are:
But why do the goals you set for your customer service team (or that they set for themselves) need to be SMART?
The point of setting goals is to be as clear as possible about expectations:
There shouldn’t be ambiguity in customer service goals. That’s because while a well-defined goal tells your team members what success looks like, it also acts as a catalyst or guide to help you get there.
This may be from a customer standpoint (satisfaction, response time, self-service, etc.), from an individual perspective (performance or professional development), or from a company perspective (cost per customer, retention rate, expansion rate, etc.).
First, keep in mind that you usually can’t jump right into creating a goal. There’s always an assessment period first.
You need to spend some time figuring out what the current state of your customer service team is.
Some questions you can ask to guide your assessment:
Your assessment will be highly dependent on your team and company, but these questions should give you an idea of the things you should consider as you work to define your goals.
Once you’ve done the foundational work to understand what your team needs to improve on, you can begin using that information to define your goals.
Let’s break it down in the context of a real customer service SMART goal.
Any goal you set should be clear and well-defined. For example, “answer customers faster” is a nice aim, but what are the channels where you want to answer customers faster? What does “faster” mean?
A more specific goal for reducing customer wait times would be to set a target first response time for a specific channel, such as: “Send a first response to customers within 60 seconds of their initial chat message.”
Depending on your needs, you could get even more specific: “Send a response to customers inquiring about their order status in 60 seconds or less.”
Any customer service goal should be measurable, so you can understand whether you’ve achieved the goal (or not) and adjust your strategy appropriately.
Taking our example from above, a measurable target chat response time goal could be: “80% of customers will receive a response to their initial chat message within 60 seconds.”
This is the point at which your initial assessment becomes really important.
“80% of customers will receive a response to their initial chat message within 60 seconds” may sound like an achievable goal. It might be doable if you have a simple product or many agents trained and available to handle chats.
But what if you have only two chat agents and are receiving hundreds of chats each day?
Of course, you still want to strive to improve their first response times, but you’ll have to set reasonable expectations to give your agents a fair shot at success.
An attainable goal in this context might instead involve increasing the initial chat response time or decreasing the percentage of customers you’re targeting, like this:
Your context will determine what makes the most sense for your team. Just remember to aim for a goal that’s stretching, yet realistic.
This is another area in which your foundational assessment is key.
First, are your proposed customer service goals aligned with your customer service values and company’s objectives? If not, they won’t be effective or successful, no matter how well they fit the SMART parameters.
Secondly, are your goals relevant to your team? For instance, a manager with a high chat volume might adapt our example to involve implementing a chatbot in order to hit their desired initial chat response time goal.
But a manager with a low ticket volume probably can’t justify the time and expense of implementing a chatbot because the benefits will never outweigh the costs for their team.
This parameter is closely tied to being measurable. You won’t be able to determine whether you’ve succeeded unless you know when the goal needs to be achieved.
To make our example time-bound, we could edit it to read: “By the end of Q2 2024, we’ll be responding to 80% of customers within 60 seconds of their initial chat message.”
Customer service goals aren’t just about how your agents interact with your customers. Surveys have shown again and again that customers want the option to solve their own problems.
A goal for developing effective self-service could be:
“By [DATE] we’ll have launched a knowledge base with articles answering our 10 most frequently asked questions about [PRODUCT], resulting in at least a 10% reduction in tickets about those issues.”
Many knowledge base tools will have built-in ticket deflection tracking features, such as giving you the number of views for an article and the number of tickets created after the article was viewed.
You can also measure the success of this goal by tracking ticket volume for a specific category or tag over time.
Implementing a quality assurance program is a great way to improve overall customer satisfaction, response and resolution times, and brand recognition. It’s also a more objective way to measure and track agent performance and to kick-off conversations about professional development with your team.
It might look like this:
“In January 2024, develop a draft QA scorecard based on ticket reviews from the previous 3 months, so that we can begin calibration sessions with the team in February 2024.”
In this case, measuring success is relatively simple: is the draft scorecard available by February 2024 when calibration conversations must begin?
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is crucial to your support team’s success, but also the overall success of the company. To build a customer-first organization, improving or maintaining your customer satisfaction score should be one of your main goals.
A sample goal for CSAT could be:
“Each month next quarter, maintain an overall CSAT across text channels (chat and email) of 85% or better.”
You can gather CSAT ratings using built-in tools on your customer communication platforms, or through a dedicated CSAT tool to send customer surveys. Most tools will calculate your CSAT score or percentage automatically.
As we’ve already covered, customer service agents are most engaged when they understand what their role is and can see how their contributions matter (both to their entire team and the company).
A goal for improving your customer service team’s overall engagement could be:
“Have a monthly one-on-one with each agent on my team and arrange at least one team social event a quarter, with the aim of reducing employee turnover by 10 percent by the end of the year.”
As you can see, this goal includes multiple conditions for success, and the team turnover rate is a metric that can be directly measured.
As a customer service manager, you get an especially broad view of how customers use and feel about your product. You also have the ability to take that customer feedback and put it in the hands of those who need it: your product team, your engineering team, your marketing team, and so on.
This can be as simple as implementing a public customer feature request tool where your customers can share their feedback and vote on what they want to see, or as complicated as setting up an internal, cross-functional customer feedback process.
The goal for becoming the voice of your customer could be:
“Have a bi-weekly Voice of the Customer meeting with the product development team, leading to at least one product bug fix and one new customer-requested feature release every quarter.”
You could measure this goal in a number of ways, depending on your strategy. If you have implemented a dedicated customer feedback tool, you can track customer usage against the rate of product releases and bug fixes. You could also track ticket volume in a specific category as well as any impact on CSAT ratings.
Everyone has their specialties and their weaknesses, and your customer service agents are no different. Quality assurance programs are a great way to identify areas for improvement, but you may also uncover opportunities during performance and career development conversations.
Your customer service reps can improve by seeking training in special topics, professional development courses, and peer support. Working with each team member to set and achieve goals for improvement fosters a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
A good example of goal for your agent could be:
“Get training on my weakest skills as identified by our QA reviews during the next month so that my average handle time goes down to [TARGET] by the end of the quarter.”
They can measure the success of this goal through attendance and completion of training, as well as by looking for improved QA scores and handle times.
The more customer service agents take ownership of their customers’ experience, the happier both they and the customer will be.
Owning the customer’s experience will mean something different for every team. It may look like being the customer’s one point of contact for an issue, or it may mean acting as the customer’s guide as they move through the escalation process.
It may look like answering every CSAT rating, good and bad, to thank the customer for their thoughts and solicit more feedback. Or it may mean reviewing their own customer interactions, identifying missed opportunities for exceeding customer expectations or anticipating customer needs, and devising strategies for doing so in the future.
A goal for owning the customer experience could be:
“I’ll reduce my ticket escalation rate by X percent in Q2 by being the primary agent on tickets about Y topic.”
Measuring your growth at owning the customer experience will depend a lot on what specifically that means for your company. For the example above, you’d measure the achievement by looking at the percentage of tickets you’re still escalating on the specific topic.
As you’re building out goals for yourself or your customer service team, remember to take a step back occasionally and look at the big picture.
Are these goals aligned with your company and your team’s vision? Are they clear or confusing? Are they too inter-dependent, so that if you fail at one, you fail at them all?
There’s nothing magical about setting SMART goals. They’re a fantastic tool for customer service teams, but the real key is in making goal-setting a discipline and a habit you’re regularly engaging in. Setting goals is not a one-time task — it’s an ongoing process of adaptation and growth.
The landscape of customer service is always changing, and your goals will need to evolve with it.
