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Improve Your Small Business Customer Service with 14 Tips
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by
Ludovic Armand
December 19, 2022
· Updated on
As a small business owner, you are probably aware of the importance of offering first-rate customer service to the development and success of your enterprise. It can enhance your entire reputation and brand image in addition to helping you to retain current consumers and draw in new ones.
In today's competitive market, it's important to go above and beyond in meeting the needs and expectations of your customers. In fact, a recent study from American Express showed that 33% of people would consider switching companies immediately after receiving poor customer service.
This article will explore customer service tips for small businesses to provide a top-notch client experience.
Most of us know that providing good customer service is important, however, it might be a little harder to express why this is true. By understanding why customer service is important you'll be able to better understand why investing in it is a good idea for your business.
There are 4 principal reasons why investing in customer service might be a good idea for your business.
Good customer service is essential for providing assistance and support to customers before, during, and after they purchase your products or services. And happy customers are not likely to switch to your competitor.
In fact, a recent study showed that a bad experience will almost make your customer switch to your competitor. The same study showed that 64% of consumers think that pricing is less important than their experience.
While it might be hard as a small team to provide a good customer experience and it can be tempting to automate your customer support, it's important to make sure the interactions you have with your clients provide value and respond to their needs.
Creating a positive reputation for your business is an amazing asset to develop. Indeed, study showed that 72% of customers will share their positive experience with others. After all, word of mouth from happy customers is one of the most powerful forms of marketing.
It's well known by now that keeping customers is better in the long term than continually attracting new ones. and clients who had a good experience are more likely to stay and repeat their purchase over and over again.
Another aspect of customer service that is less talked about is the fact that it provides a great communication channel with your clients. It can be valuable to gain insight into your product or service from people actually using it and to discover new segments or use cases that you didn't think about in the first place.
Great client service is only as good as the people delivering it. After all, they are responsible for managing customer interactions and ensuring that clients are happy with their experiences.
To make it efficient, helpful, and personalized, you should follow some key aspects:
But you might be wondering how can you make sure the service you provide actually answers these questions. Well, it has been proven that we're not good at analyzing if the service we provide is good or not. So why not use your interactions with your clients to gain some valuable feedback and work on the parts that could be improved
Overall, great customer care is about making your clients feel valued and satisfied and going above and beyond to meet their needs and expectations. With the customer service best practices, you can ensure that you’re offering a great experience to your clients.
A great way to ensure you can offer a great customer experience to your customers is by using customer service software to manage all inquiries. We've already covered the best customer service email software in another article, but here's a summary of the 5 best solutions to help you offer the best customer support.
As we’ve seen, offering great support is crucial for any small business. We've gartered the best tips that we've observed from our own experience to help you bring your customer service to the next level.
While our goal isn't to help you build a customer service plan from the ground up. We think these strategies will provide a way to implement a consistent and effective way to manage interactions with your customers.
We also recommend you have a look at our best practices for customer service guide to learn more.
Here are 14 small business customer service tips you should start using.
Showing love and care helps to foster a positive relationship with clients. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, which can ultimately result in repeat business and positive word-of-mouth advertising for your business. Additionally, showing love and care can also help to reduce the likelihood of negative customer experiences, which can damage the reputation of your company.
In a small business, where every customer matters, demonstrating love and care can be a valuable tool for building and maintaining a successful customer service experience.
It can be beneficial that the feedback from your customers is used by your company to help improve the overall customer experience but also your product and/or service. Your clients are in the best place to let you know what works and what doesn’t with your offer.
You can also use their feedback to develop new features, new products, or new services as you will probably learn what are the limitations they are facing.
According to an article published in Harvard Business Review, 81% of customers attempt to resolve problems themselves before contacting customer service. Creating resources your users or future clients can access 24/7 to solve and answer their basic questions or problems can help your business, no matter what you’re offering.
A comprehensive and easy-to-navigate self-help section on your website can bring many benefits:
A well-designed self-service section on your website can provide numerous benefits for both your customers and your customer service team. However, you should make sure that your knowledge base content stays accurate and that it is updated regularly.
Being able to efficiently and effectively solve your customers’ problems and meet their needs is important for small businesses because it helps to improve customer satisfaction and retention.
According to a study done by Statista, 27 percent of the respondents cited lack of effectiveness as the primary cause of their customer service frustration.
When customers feel like their issues are being addressed in a timely and satisfactory manner, they are more likely to continue doing business with the company.
Try focusing on effectiveness in your customer interactions instead of just trying to resolve the most tickets in the least amount of time. This way, you can avoid frustration from your clients.
Giving the same support to the smaller clients as you would for the bigger ones can be beneficial for your business. Often the smaller ones are the most public in their praise and love for your product.
Small businesses often rely on word of mouth for their reputation, and if a small customer feels neglected or not valued, they are more likely to speak negatively about your business to others. On the other hand, if a small customer feels valued and receives excellent customer service, they are more likely to spread positive word of mouth and potentially bring in more business.
Giving the same level of support to all customers also shows a level of fairness and consistency, which can improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Customers are more likely to continue using a business if they know they will receive the same level of support every time.
Furthermore, as a small business, you probably have limited resources and may not be able to offer different levels of support based on the size or value of a customer. Treating all customers equally allows your company to utilize its resources efficiently and effectively.
Following up with customers has been a big win for us at Missive since the very beginning. When you’re small, you don’t have all the features that some of your bigger competitors might have.
We’ve followed up on emails 2+ years old. People were a lot more impressed that we did follow up after all this time than annoyed, especially since we were shipping a feature they wanted or that blocked them to try Missive to begin with.
Honesty is a crucial aspect of excellent customer service because it helps to build trust and credibility with your customers. When you are upfront and transparent about your products and services, customers are more likely to feel confident in their decision to do business with you.
If one of your customers has a problem or complaint, it is important, to be honest about the situation and take steps to resolve it in a timely and satisfactory manner. It demonstrates a commitment to customer satisfaction and can help to prevent negative reviews or complaints from spreading.
At the very beginning of Missive, we weren’t afraid to refer people to competitors. That is also when follow-ups are important. You have some leads that you have redirected somewhere else, but you know you can eventually reach back with a good chance to convert.
Being honest means being upfront about your products and services, including any potential limitations or restrictions. It also means being open and honest about any mistakes or issues that may arise and working to resolve them quickly and fairly.
According to HubSpot Research, 90% of customers say “immediate” responses to customer service questions are important or very important. In addition, according to 60% of customers, "immediate" means within 10 minutes.
While answering all customers’ questions within 10 minutes might be hard for a small business with limited resources, it is still important to be responsive and available to your clients.
When customers feel like they can rely on a company to quickly and efficiently address their needs, they are more likely to return and recommend the business to others.
Additionally, being responsive and available can help small businesses to identify and resolve customer issues more quickly preventing small issues from turning into larger problems that may be more difficult and costly to fix.
At Missive, we rarely have emails sit in the team inbox for more than a few hours. The right balance between immediate (a lot of questions get answered by themselves if you give people a bit of time and good self-help resources) and too long (you do want your customers to feel like you’re dedicated and responsive) has to be found.
Overall, being responsive and available to customers is an essential part of providing good customer service, and it is especially important for small businesses that rely on customer loyalty and repeat business to thrive.
Getting overwhelmed by the support of customers’ requests can result in poor communication, slow response times, and a lack of attention to detail. This can lead to frustrated customers who do not feel valued or heard, which can ultimately harm the reputation of your business.
At Missive, it’s been a tremendous weight off our collective shoulders when we started using assignments to stop receiving replies that were assigned to someone else. We know we’re all always a single @mention away.
With good customer service collaboration, team members are not overwhelmed. They can take the time to fully understand customer needs and provide personalized, efficient solutions leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
As a small business owner, you probably know your product or service down to the last detail. But by making sure your team is knowledgeable about your product or service, they will be able to better understand and address customers’ questions and concerns. This can help to build trust and confidence with clients.
Knowing your product also allows you to be proactive in addressing potential problems or issues that may arise. If you are familiar with the product or service, you can anticipate potential issues and work to prevent them from occurring. This can save you time and resources, as well as improve the overall customer experience.
In addition, having a deep understanding of your product or service allows you to better tailor your customer service to the needs of your customers. You can offer personalized recommendations or solutions based on your knowledge of the product or service, helping to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
By treating your customers as individuals rather than just a transaction, you can differentiate yourself and stand out from competitors. This means going above and beyond to ensure that each customer feels valued and appreciated. Taking the time to understand a customer's unique needs and tailoring the service to meet those needs can help build strong, long-lasting relationships.
When a customer feels like they are being treated as an individual rather than just a transaction, they are more likely to return to your business in the future. This helps to increase customer retention and can ultimately lead to increased profits.
Having a presence on multiple communication channels allows customers to choose the method that they feel is most comfortable and convenient to use.
A study from Statista found that 42% of customers prefer calling, 20% prefer emailing, and 38% prefer digital channels to contact customer service.
Depending on the industry, these numbers can change. And chances are, if you’re a SaaS, emails will be among the preferred methods to get support.
Being available on multiple platforms, like email, SMS, live chat, phone call, and social media is a great way to build a good relationship with clients.
Adding a response to a draft is really easy with the search option.
You are probably getting a lot of the same questions over and over again and manually answering all of them can be time-consuming, especially for a small team. Canned responses are a great way to make replying to these emails a lot faster.
Templates also allow you to ensure that all responses to common questions are consistent and that your customers receive the same level of service and information no matter who they are interacting with within your business.
Using canned responses can also free up time for your team to focus on more complex or unique customer inquiries, allowing for better and more efficient customer service overall.
However, as we’ve seen in the previous tip, personalized service is the key. It’s best to personalize these templates with variables to make your reply more friendly.
Using internal tools for customer service can greatly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the support provided. With good collaboration software for small businesses such as Missive, you and your team can easily work together to track and respond to customer inquiries, resolve issues more quickly, and improve overall customer satisfaction.
Overall, using technology can help you provide better, faster, and more personalized service, which can lead to increased customer loyalty and ultimately, more business for your small company.
There are many tools and platforms available that can help your business improve its customer cares, such as live chat, a customer relationship management (CRM) system, and a messaging system.
These tools can help you to respond to customers quickly and efficiently but having to switch between all these apps can be counterproductive. With Missive, you can gather all your communications channels in one collaborative communication tool that integrates many other tools you might already be using.
In order to maximize customer satisfaction, gain a competitive edge in the market, build a favorable brand reputation, and develop your products or services, exceptional customer service is crucial for your company. Effective communication, empathy, responsiveness, and problem-solving are all key components of a positive customer experience.
By implementing the 14 tips discussed in this article, you can improve customer service and provide a top-notch experience for your clients.
Have questions on how can Missive help your business? Read how LANDR is using Missive to solve customer inquiries efficiently or book a demo!
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.
