In the world of customer support, delivering exceptional service and ensuring customer satisfaction are paramount. To achieve these goals, you can use the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) align teams and keep track of progress.
OKRs provide a simple way for customer support teams to focus their efforts, measure their progress, and continually improve their performance.
Focus areas:
Key questions:
What are the main issues faced by our customers?
How can we improve our responsiveness?
How good are our supporting resources?
Can we improve our relationships with other teams
Setting Customer Support OKRs
Your OKRs should move from quarter to quarter and map to your company's reality – that's why we thought it's best to illustrate things as a case study that you can take inspiration from.
General advice
Take advantage of your Objectives to be specific about your opportunities. Avoid statements like "Be great", or "Improve support". It's pretty obvious that we want to deliver a great support experience, and vague statements won't help people understand how they can help.
Good Objectives should focus on specific aspects of Customer Support. "Be great" leaves too much room for interpretation. "Significantly improve response times" will produce more focused initiatives.
Examples of Customer Support OKRs
OKRs to optimize support efficiency and effectiveness
Optimize support efficiency and effectiveness
Reduce average first response time (FRT) by 25% through streamlined ticket routing
Increase the average resolution rate by 15% by empowering support agents
Implement a self-service knowledge base and achieve a self-resolution rate of 20%
OKRs to improve team productivity and collaboration
Improve team productivity and collaboration
Reduce manual effort and automate repetitive tasks to get a 20% increase in tickets resolved per agent
Conduct regular knowledge sharing sessions and achieve a 90% participation rate
Reduce internal escalations by 30% through improved communication channels and documentation
OKRs to continuously improve customer support quality
Continuously improve customer support quality
Implement a robust quality assurance program that results in a 95% score on quality assessments
Increase customer sentiment analysis accuracy to 90% by leveraging natural language processing and sentiment analysis tools
Conduct regular customer support training sessions
OKRs to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty
Enhance customer satisfaction
Achieve a customer satisfaction score (CSAT) of 95% or above
Reduce customer churn rate by 20% through improved support processes, personalized interactions
Increase positive customer reviews and testimonials by 30%
OKRs to enhance customer self-help resources and documentation
Enhance customer self-help resources and documentation
Increase knowledge base CSAT by 20% by revamping the content and expanding articles
Reduce the time to create and publish new support documentation by 30%
Improve search to get a 25% increase in successful searches and relevant article suggestions
Tracking your OKRs
Knowing how to write good OKRs is critical, but without good tracking in place, the OKRs will fade away and focus will be lost.
The easier it is for a team to have weekly discussions around the OKRs, the better they'll execute. Here are a few best practices for tracking OKRs.
1. Do weekly check-ins
Quarterly OKRs should be tracked every week to be effective. Without a continuous reflection on progress, your OKRs won't be much different from having KPIs.
The check-ins process can be automated with a platform like Tability that takes care of reminders, and distribute updates to the teams.
2. Keep track of your confidence
Good progress updates should help everyone understand how far we are from our goal, but also how confident we are in achieving it. You can use a simple red/yellow/green color coding to indicate your confidence.
3. Make trends easy to see
Lastly, it's important to look at trends to avoid false positives. It's not rare for a team to have a hot start and then slow down mid quarter. This will be hard to see unless you can look at progress trends for individual Key Results.
What other Customer Support metrics can you use?
Now that you've got good Objectives, it's time to pick some key results and finding good metrics that work for your team can be tricky. Lucky for you, we've laid out all the best success metrics for your teams to use.
Here are a few to get you started:
Top 10 Customer Support metrics
First Response Time
The average time it takes to respond to a customer's initial support request
Average Resolution Time
The average time it takes to resolve a customer support ticket
Customer Satisfaction
A metric that measures the satisfaction of customers with the support received
First Contact Resolution Rate
The rate at which support issues are resolved during the first contact with the customer
Ticket Backlog
The number of unresolved support tickets in the backlog
Customer Effort Score (CES)
A metric that measures the effort required by customers to accomplish tasks or actions
Ticket Volume
The total number of support tickets received within a specific timeframe
Average Response Time
The average time it takes to respond to customer support requests
Customer Retention Rate
The percentage of customers who continue to use the product or service over time
Ticket Resolution Rate
The rate at which support tickets are resolved or closed
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Stop wasting your OKRs. Focus on the right work and accomplish your goals.
