“Failure to prepare is preparing to fail.”

You’ve probably heard that old adage. Indeed, when it comes to running a successful business, preparation is pretty important. If you want to reduce your churn rate and smash your business goals this year, it may be time to lay some best plans.

We may be well into January but it’s not too late to make or refine some goals for your customer retention strategy.

Be SMART About It

One method for creating goals is using the SMART method. Your goals must be:

Specific

Really nail down what it is you want to achieve.

Smartsheet recommends defining the 6 typical ‘W’ components of what you aim to achieve: who, what, when, where, which and why.

Measurable

How will you know that you have reached the goal? What analytics will you use? Customer response time? Consumer satisfaction?

Attainable

Is the goal something that you can actually reach, given the resources you have?

Relevant

Is the goal important for your company? Does it tie in with larger goals? Does it fit with your mission statement?

Time

Set a date for when you would like to achieve your goal, this can help to keep you focused.

Goal Examples

There are a number of goals that can help you to keep more customers thanks to live response. Your goal may simply be to reduce your churn rate by certain amount. But here are a few more specific suggestions:

Improve Customer Response Time

One of the reasons live support software is such an effective customer support tool is its speed. 79% of customers tend to prefer live chat for the immediacy it offers. If you have a long response time, you are not taking full advantage of this and it could be affecting your churn rate. You may want to set a goal to reduce the time it takes your agents to respond. Maybe some extra staff training would help so that they can manage multiple queries effectively, or you could consider growing your team.

Improve Customer Satisfaction Rating

One of the ways to measure consumer satisfaction is by asking customers to rate your service in a post-chat survey. The happier your customers are, the more likely they are to stay with you. Looking at chat history to see what worked and what didn’t work for your company could help here, as well as improving your FCR or first contact resolution, although that could be a separate goal in itself.

Plan Stuff, Profit More

Hopefully that’s enough to get you started. Goals can help to keep more customers and increase your profit margins overall. A quality live support software such as Xeno can help you to create goals and monitor your progress, optimizing your customer retention strategy. Xeno has a host of metrics including response time, FCR and more. You can easily create post-chat surveys to monitor satisfaction levels and look back over past conversations for reference.