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8 Steps to Create a Customer Service Strategy
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by
Maryna Paryvai
December 12, 2023
· Updated on
Everyone has a story about how poor customer service made them never want to engage with the same brand again. On the other hand, excellent customer service makes customers feel appreciated and plays a key role in their buying journeys (alongside factors like quality and price).
PwC’s research underscores this fact, revealing that 42% of consumers are ready to pay more for friendly, welcoming customer service. That's right – customers are ready to open their wallets if you don’t drop the ball in assisting them.
But recognizing the importance of customer support is just the first step. Without a strategic approach, your valuable time, resources, and energy will get wasted on unnecessary actions and tasks, resulting in a less-than-optimal customer service experience.
To turn customer service into a competitive advantage, you need to act strategically and ensure that your every action contributes to providing excellent customer care.
Your customer service strategy is the action plan for how your organization will consistently deliver high-quality customer service across your customer base. It’s the roadmap you’ll follow to create satisfied customers and to develop a customer-centric strategy.
At the core of an effective customer service strategy lies a proactive and purposeful approach to meeting customer expectations.
A good strategy outlines specific goals and processes for your customer service team so they can deliver a positive experience to your customers. It helps allocate your company's resources to create an optimal customer experience and service efficiency, ensuring consistently great experiences across all customer support interactions. But it’s not just about the tactical — how you’ll answer customer questions or handle complaints — it's also about maximizing your organization's resources to create a customer-first company culture.
When creating a customer service strategy, start by understanding your customer needs and take into account factors such as market dynamics, competitor research, and your brand’s overall mission and value prop.
Investing in a strong customer service strategy has hardly any downsides. Instead, it brings a ton of benefits, all of which help maximize the impact of your sales and service efforts, driving long-term growth. The key benefits include:
You’ve likely heard about tools like Buffer, Zapier or Basecamp — companies that have seen massive growth by placing big bets on great customer service. Why? Because happy, loyal customers tend to have a higher life-time value and become strong brand advocates, spreading the word and driving referrals.
In an era where trust in traditional marketing is declining, satisfied customers advocating for your brand become a powerful force for attracting new customers. According to Hubspot, 75% of consumers don’t trust advertisements, but 90% of people believe the purchase recommendations of their friends.
That’s why acting strategically and consistently elevating your customer service is crucial for sustained business growth.
If you’re just starting to develop your customer service strategy from scratch, the journey may seem daunting. But fear not. Below, we’ll go over the key components of crafting a winning strategy that drives lasting success.
Each step here is a critical building block toward a customer service culture that stands the test of time, even in the middle of ever-changing market demands.
Researching and understanding your customers' unique needs is the cornerstone of building a robust customer service strategy. Really knowing your customers — being customer first — is how you take a generic plan and tailor it into something transformational for your business.
Here are key considerations that should guide your research:
With a deeper understanding of your customer needs, the next step in crafting your customer service strategy is defining your vision. A customer service vision, at its essence, is your team’s shared understanding of what good customer service looks like.
It helps get everyone on the same page and align perspectives.
At this stage, you must clearly articulate how you want your brand to be perceived by customers. Based on that vision, you’ll be able to define key elements of your customer service strategy, such as:
The next step in the process is to create a customer service playbook with guidelines that your support team should follow. It’s where you define what customer interactions should look like and serves as a reference point for your team.
Just like an NFL team uses a playbook to show every player where they should be on the field, your customer service playbook will guide your team’s actions each day.
Your playbook should cover your customer service best practices, and can include things like:
As you work on creating your playbook, avoid complex terminology. Aim to keep it concise and clear, making the document easy for your team to use whenever they need it. You may want to consider using a knowledge base tool like Guru or KnowledgeOwl to make your playbook easily searchable.
The fourth critical step involves developing a hiring process that ensures the alignment of your new team members with your established vision and values.
A scorecard for rating candidates based on how well they resonate with the values you've defined can be a game-changer during the hiring process. It helps you translate your feelings about candidates into quantified data, which you can use to make better decisions.
This ensures that every addition to your team is not only equipped with the necessary skills but also shares a genuine commitment to the customer-centric vision and culture you aim to create.
By prioritizing cultural fit in the hiring process, you lay the groundwork for a team that can deliver on your strategy. But building your team doesn’t end there when a new employee starts. You’ll also need to coach and train your team to keep people engaged and motivated.
Remember, how you treat your team members shapes how they, in turn, treat your customers.
No strategy is complete without defining the KPIs for measuring your team’s success. Based on your vision, identify which metrics will best reflect successful execution.
Common customer service KPIs include:
Remember, if you can measure it, you can manage it. Most customer service tools will include customer service analytics that will help here. Don’t feel tempted to measure every KPI under the sun. Pick a few complementary KPIs — like first reply time, CSAT, and NPS — and optimize around those metrics over time.
Monitoring your KPIs is important, but you’ll typically improve upon them through executing specific, time-bound projects. That’s where SMART goals come into play.
If you’re not familiar with SMART goals, they’re goals that are:
Sometimes customer service leaders feel like SMART goals aren’t applicable to their teams (because support tickets never stop coming in and KPIs are ongoing), but they’re actually a helpful tool.
For instance, maybe you’re not happy with your team’s first reply time. Instead of setting a hard-to-action goal like, “Reduce First Reply Time by 10%,” SMART goals help you prioritize and manage projects that are likely to reduce first reply time:
With SMART goals like these, you’re bound to see a positive impact on your overarching first reply time goal.
Your customer support strategy is a dynamic thing. It’s continuously evolving, and you’ll need to make regular process adjustments as your customers’ needs and your company’s strategy shift.
That’s why you need feedback loops.
The two main sources of feedback on your customer service strategy are your customers and your team:
When boxer Mike Tyson was interviewed about his fight plan for fighting Evander Holyfield, he famously replied, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
Your customer service strategy is going to take punches over time — negative feedback from customers, pivots from your product managers, and budget cuts from your board. Whatever shape those hits might take, the key is building a resilient and flexible strategy that allow for real-time adjustments whenever needed.
Customer service used to just be a function within a company. You had a customer service team, and they were responsible for solving customer issues.
You probably still have a customer service team, but today’s best organizations are recognizing that customer experience is far bigger than one team’s job. It’s massive and far-reaching. As Harvard Business Review puts it, “To deliver that complete customer experience, organizations must unite around the customer in ways they’ve never had to before.”
Customer-facing teams can only achieve so much in isolation; true success comes when the entire organization rallies behind the goal of making customers happy and successful.
And that means you need to foster an organizational culture where every department understands and prioritizes customer experience. It’s easier said than done, and it’s work that takes time, but your customer service strategy should include details on how you’ll affect this kind of change.
Great places to start include sharing success stories and customer feedback across the organization. It’s also a good idea to cultivate relationships with key decision-makers who impact the customer experience — from product and engineering, to sales and marketing.
The more you can help people at every level of your organization understand what customers need, how they’re feeling, and how they can become more successful, the higher your likelihood of long-term success becomes.
Providing exceptional service to your customers isn’t just a nice thing to do. It’s a strategic business move. A move that will improve your bottom line and lead to better long-term results.
Crafting a beautiful customer service strategy is only the beginning of that journey. A beautiful strategy on paper doesn’t change anything — it’s the implementation and execution that makes all the difference. And it starts with investing in the key tools that your customer service team is using to interact with your customers all day, every day.
That’s where Missive comes into play. Missive is a team inbox and chat app that empowers your whole team to collaborate and help customers effectively across a ton of different channels. If you’re ready to transform your customer conversations and join the ranks of high-growth companies like Buffer, try Missive out for free today.
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.
