Most of this blog’s readers will know what SMART goals indicate, and although there are a few variations of what the acronym stands for, they’ve represented a great way for many organisations to determine whether an objective has been set correctly. This model, if you can call it that, can be applied to all business areas, and generally helps manage projects and build plans that deliver results.
Creating (or reviewing) your goals when it comes to Customer Experience, or Voice of the Customer/Employee programmes, is a really powerful way to ensure they’re designed with outcomes in mind, not simply for the sake of it – and that happens more often that you would think in all industries and all regions.
A quick reminder or explanation for those of you not familiar with SMART goals. Often associated with renowned business authors George T. Doran and Peter Drucker, the SMART model encourages organisations to define business objectives as:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-based
I’d like to share with you my thoughts on how this simple approach can be applied to your CX programme.
1. Specific
So much focus has been placed on ‘customer centricity” as a goal in itself that some organisations have simply stopped trying to define what it means for them. A much better situation I must say than those who fail to care altogether or decide CX is “not for them” (you’ll be surprised how often I hear this, especially for medium-sized companies).
But still, customer centricity might be a worthy cause, but it’s definitely not a SMART goal. To achieve a successful CX programme, you need to define specific goals that are aligned to your overall business objectives. So instead of aiming for customer centricity, or even reducing customer churn, make sure you define exactly what success looks like: for example, a key CX goal could be “Increase response rates for top tier customers by 30%”. It might look a bit tactical but if you don’t manage to get feedback from your most valuable customers, you’re aiming for failure. Another goal could be “Reduce customer churn in the next financial year by 20%”.
I’m afraid there’s no simple recipe here… The specificity of your goals means they need to be defined in line with your overall objectives, the maturity stage of your programme, your budget and resources, whether you have executive buy-in or not. But the more specific you are, the better the odds that you’ll achieve success.
2. Measurable
Obvious, isn’t it? And yet. Measurable in the case of a CX programme needs to include at least 2 levels:
Tactical: as in my previous example, “Increase response rates for top tier customers by 30%” is specific and measurable, so that’s a great start!
Strategic: to drive change and business success, your CX goals need to relate to your overall business objectives. Therefore you need to find a way to measure the effect of your tactical goals on larger business outcomes.
In this context, increasing response rates for key accounts will ensure you have their insights and you’re able to take action to gain their trust and loyalty. So the overall strategic objective here is driving higher revenue through less customer churn.
This brings us nicely to the topic of which CX metric to choose… Ha, that old chestnut! To NPS®, or not to NPS… Definitely a topic too large to tackle in this blog, but selecting the right metric for your business will have an immense effect on linking your tactical with your strategic objectives. Also keeping an eye on CX trends around your selected metric(s) is a great way of monitoring customer loyalty – as long as you don’t spend so long staring at numbers that you lose sight of the bigger picture!
3. Attainable
In the context of CX, this means starting small – in terms of the number of goals, and the scope of these goals. Linked to specificity, attainability leads to success. So often we see business leaders associate “achievable” with a certain lack of ambition. By no means should that be the case, but if the goal is simply too ambitious, and failure is all but guaranteed, motivating your teams to reach it is going to be somewhat of a challenge.
For me an attainable objective is also closely related to the maturity stage of your CX programme. At first, you might want to focus on increasing response rates by 20%, later increasing your Net Promoter Score (NPS)® by 5%, and even later reducing churn by 5%...
Too often I’ve seen the drive to reach great heights – a laudable goal in itself – lead to the downfall of a whole programme. In many cases it would have saved time and money if leaders kept their goals attainable.
4. Relevant
When we say attainable, not only do we mean there’s a chance the goal can be achieved, but also that it’s relevant to different teams. The call centre agent should have a goal that’s linked to his or her day-to-day work and objectives, around encouraging customers to respond to a survey for example. Same for the account management leader whose goal should be to contact detractors to understand their concerns better.
Although CX goals should be aligned to the wider business objectives of the company, they do need to be tailored for every team as they can only affect what they can control. A key mission at the board level should be [but rarely is] to ensure all departments are aiming in the right direction, within the scope of their team objectives. If the call centre agent is still rewarded on reducing average call time, and the overall goal is to reduce churn, well, you know where I’m going with this. Obvious to many of you I’m sure… but almost inevitably, organisations still tend to have a rather unhealthy lack of relevance when setting goals, and too often in silos.
5. Time-based
This is probably the easiest trait to understand. Goals should be time-specific – they’re usually set in terms of quarters, or multiples of quarters. Such is the rhythm most companies follow so it makes sense that CX goals too are set within this framework.
And it does make sense to set a number of quarterly objectives, with corresponding metrics, that roll up to a smaller set of yearly objectives. They don’t all need to be connected - for example some tactical objectives might be quarterly only. But all this still works if goals are set with overall business objectives in mind.
In my experience, the SMART model is no guarantee of success but it does help prevent one critical issue that CX and marketing departments often get blamed for: confusing goals with activities. I’ve tried to reinforce for each of the 5 points above that the overall business strategy, supported by SMART goals at all levels and in all departments, needs to act as the foundation and guide.
This is especially true around Customer Experience as teams can easily rally around the idea of making customers happier, and create hundreds of activities that on paper aim for this noble cause. Focusing on SMART goals instead, with a strategic view of increasing revenue through reduced customer churn for example, will yield much better results and won’t overload your workforce in the process. As often the case, less is more, and SMARTer is definitely better.
Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.
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