Article • 13 min read
SMART customer service goals to aim for in 2025
How do you write a customer service goal? We teach you the SMART goals model for setting and achieving key customer service objectives.
上次更新日期: February 24, 2025
The road to unhappy customers is paved with vague intentions.
Solid goal setting is big for a support team’s success—and, by proxy, your customers’ happiness. Without it? You’re going to feel the bad effects.
5 targets for customer service goals
Achieving your ideal customer service results starts with clear objectives. One of the most popular methods of goal development is SMART. The acronym, originally released in a 1981 article by Director of Corporate Planning for Washington Water Power Company George T. Doran, lists five requirements each customer service goal must meet.
The number one question I get: “What are your other customers doing?” Which is helpful only to an extent because what they do may not really be what you do. Copying off your neighbor’s test is not going to help you in this situation.
Sam Chandler, director, startup success, Zendesk
Understanding customer service goals: a deep dive
Using the SMART method, you can help your reps work towards the ultimate support goals: customer happiness, customer loyalty, and a great customer experience.
Specific: Design narrow, support-focused objectives
As mentioned earlier, knowledge creation is generally not an agent’s top daily priority. Hence, it’s considered extra work. That’s why investing in the right technology that facilitates knowledge creation is paramount for every smart goal.
Eighty percent of New Year’s resolutions fail. One reason? The objectives aren’t specific enough. To meet your goals, they must be highly specific and detailed.
Think about the New Year’s resolution nearly half of all people make: losing weight. A goal so broad can seem impossible to meet because it’s hard to know where to get started. That feeling of being overwhelmed causes most people to abandon the goal before they’ve really begun.
In plain words, what are you trying to accomplish in your business? And how can we relate that to your customer service?
Sam Chandler, director, startup success, Zendesk
What if, instead of having this vague, fuzzy objective, you zoomed in a little? Maybe, “I will walk two miles every day for three months,” or “I will lose two pounds a week for a total of 40 pounds in five months.” These goals are more likely to succeed because they break a larger, overarching goal into smaller, and more achievable, goals and tasks.
The same tactic can apply to customer service goals. “Improve customer satisfaction” can be broken down into targeted goals like “decrease call transfer occurrence by 30 percent over a six-week period.”
If you want to make sure your goals are focused enough, test them by making sure you can answer the following questions.
Say, for example, that you currently have customer complaints about the long wait times when they call support and you want to build a goal around improving first call reply times.
Based on these answers, you can set your new objective: “We will decrease our average support call wait times by 50 percent within six weeks by designing and implementing a targeted and detailed program led by Mark.” Instead of setting for the original objective—lowering wait times—you’ve crafted a goal that is more specific, detailed, and actionable. And you’ve invested in authentic customer care.
Measurable customer service goals: how to start
I’ve worked with customers whose end-users value speed—they need to get their answer quickly. With other customers due to either the nature of their work, or how they’re using our services, it’s not so much about lowering response time, but rather about getting an in-depth answer, or decreasing the number of times that somebody submits a question.
So you really have to understand what it is that you’re trying to do, and what your customers need from you—and then your metrics should be built off of that.
Before you can get to the specifics of how to measure what you’re trying to achieve, it’s more about deciding: What’s our baseline now? Where are we with this metric now? And then how much do we want to increase, decrease it? By how much do we want to change? What is an actual goal that makes sense that can hit? What are stretch goals? And so on and so on.
—Sam Chandler, director, startup success, Zendesk
Measurable: Make a plan for tracking your customer service team’s progress
Metrics are the best way to objectively track how your goals are moving along. They’re especially valuable in support because so many measures of success aren’t always easily quantitative, like customer loyalty and customer happiness. But supporting your team with real-time metrics can be a great motivator.
To use metrics in customer service goal setting, choose one stat for every objective that clearly shows your progress. Consider these examples.
Focusing your goals around a single metric gives you a tangible way to see the results of your teams’ efforts. Honing this skill will help as you develop measurable goals.
Measurable customer service goals: start at the top
If we give our agents, our people, a goal, they’re going to find a way to hit it. So we’ve got to make sure that it’s the right goal. I am super into this concept right now called a triple metric model. It comes from essentially a book called The Expansion Sale, and it’s a way to make sure that what you’re measuring your team on actually aligns all the way up the chain to the top company metrics.
It’s a way to one, make sure that everybody’s aligned. But also, I’ve found that it really helps to show teams, “Hey, look, what you’re doing does make an impact.” When I’m choosing metrics, I try to figure out, OK, so from the top up, what ultimately are we concerned about as a company? And then going one level down, how does my organization affect that bottom line that we’re trying to get to? And then, one level down from that, OK, if this is the part of it that we’re responsible for, what are the elements that are affecting that? And then that’s how I choose my metrics.
—Sam Chandler, director, startup success, Zendesk
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Achievable: Set effective customer service goals within reach of your customer service team
Make sure you only set goals that are within your team’s power to achieve independently of another team. Smart goal tip: “Gain 10% more customers this month” isn’t realistic for a support team alone. “I’ll get customers who say, ‘I want to decrease this or increase this by 30%.’ And I ask them, ‘OK, well, where did that 30% come from?’ Often it turns out they just pulled it out of their head, or they saw another company doing it,” says Sam Chandler, director, startup success, Zendesk.
Besides, growing a customer base also depends on the sales and marketing teams.
You really have to understand what it is that you’re trying to do, and what your customers need from you, and then your metrics should be built off of that.
Sam Chandler, director, startup success, Zendesk
Setting unachievable customer service goals can lower team morale and motivation—the exact opposite of what you want in goal setting. On the flip side, setting goals your team can reasonably achieve builds confidence and motivation. In fact, a 2019 study from the University of Basel ound that setting goals that are reachable are the key to personal well-being.
Sometimes, a reality check can be helpful to make sure your goals aren’t just pipe dreams. Grab another support manager to review these questions with you to determine if your goal is doable or not.
If you answered “no” to any of these questions, all hope is not lost. You just need to create a plan to get the resources you need to move forward.
Relevant: Make sure your goals resonate with the entire company
Good goals have to matter to more than just you, the team manager. They should tie into your customer’s pain points, your reps’ objectives and the company’s overall strategy. For customers, the support team’s objectives should alleviate product issues. For reps, the goals should help them meet their own individual objectives. And for the company, the goals should contribute to the overall organization’s vision and purpose.
Tying all team goals back to your company’s strategy gives your team a unified purpose—and reminds them that, ultimately, you’re all there for the customers.
Time-bound: Give your support reps a deadline to work toward
A deadline adds accountability. Once you have a due date set, you can work backward from that deadline. Set internal goals and check-ins to make sure your team is staying on task and hitting the mini-milestones necessary to be successful.
Short-term goals can be especially good at boosting team morale and motivation because patient reps quickly see results. These short-term goals can be either team-wide or individual for each person on the team.
Say your goal is increasing individual resolved issues by 10% this week compared to the previous week. If a rep averages 10 resolved issues a day, that’s an average of 50 issues a week. To reach a goal of a 10% increase, that rep only has to resolve one more issue a day.
This short-term goal can feel a lot easier to attain than setting the same goal on a larger scale. Small wins like this can keep your support team motivated, and achieving them can build confidence.
If you’re chasing a bigger goal, make it look like a short-term goal. See if there’s a way to break it up into mini-deadlines, so it’s more approachable for your team to tackle.
Setting the right timeline can make otherwise lofty goals more manageable and add a sense of challenge and urgency to easily attainable goals.
Set and measure SMART goals with Zendesk
The perfect partner for SMART goal setting? A CRM with advanced reporting features. Zendesk’s support suite includes advanced analytics that makes measuring your team’s progress easy. The wide variety of reporting features lets you customize your statistics to track what’s most important to your goals. Our platform also automatically tracks real-time customer interaction data for extra insights. You can use this data as a live feedback mechanism to see how your goals are directly affecting customer interactions.
