Customer Success OKRs [Importance & Examples]

As per a report by Hubspot, growing companies are 21% more likely to give importance to customer success than their stagnant counterparts.

Customers are often referred to as the lifeline of every organization as they determine their failures or success. Organizations take a conscious effort to retain their existing customers and attract new ones. So it becomes crucial for all to have an efficient customer success team in place. They play an important role in all the stages of the customer life cycle and act as a direct connection between customers and your company.

Moreover, they help in creating and nurturing a strong relationship between the organization and its customers. In this article, we will guide you on how to set effective OKRs for your customer success team so that they provide amazing customer support continuously. But before we learn more about OKRs for a customer success team, let’s first understand what OKRs are and Why you should use them. 

Also Read: The Essential Guide To OKRs: Your Ultimate Tool To Setting Winning Goals

What Are OKRs?

OKRs or Objective and Key Results is a goal-setting framework that has been adopted by successful organizations such as Google, Amazon, Disney, LinkedIn, and more. The concept of OKRs was first introduced in the ’70s at Intel by Andy Grove. Later, it was popularized by John Doerr when he introduced it at Google in 1999. It became a central element to Google’s culture as a management methodology, which will help focus company efforts on the same important issue throughout the organization.

OKRs consists of two components, namely:

– Objectives : a clearly defined goal to be achieved

– Key Results : measurable steps to achieve the objectives

Each objective ideally should have 3-5 associated key results. An ideal OKR should answer two basic questions:  ‘What do you want to achieve?’ and ‘How will you achieve it?’.

Also Read: Goal Setting Processes: KPI VS OKR

Why Use Customer Success OKRs?

The benefits associated with OKRs have made it a popular goal-setting tool among all organizations. Here are some of them:

Focussed : OKRs are limited in number and set for a quarter or any specific time interval. It helps the team and the team members to focus and prioritize their tasks, depending on what is important for the month and the quarter.

Aligned : OKRs make it easy to align every employee’s goal to the organizational goal and vision. 

Stretchable : OKRs allows organizations to push themselves a step ahead and set stretch goals for themselves. As John Doerr says, “Larry Page of Google is the high priest of 10x-ing everything, stretching further. He’ll say, ‘I’d rather have the objective be to go to Mars, and if we fall short, we’ll get to the moon. This is how you make moonshots.’” 

Accountability : Everyone is accountable for their own goals and knows how success will be measured and who is responsible

Customer Success OKR Examples

Customers success OKRs are helpful at every stage of the customer success journey. Be it production, support, team performance, and customer experience, having well-defined OKRs for customer success leads to clarity and better output.

Check out the customer success OKR examples below to you get started with effective and measurable goal setting in your team.

Customer Experience OKR Examples 

Objective 1: Improve Customer Satisfaction Index in Q4 by 30%

Key Results:

– Conduct 50 customer satisfaction surveys every month

– Conduct monthly interviews with 10 recently churned customers

– Achieve a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 10.0

Team Performance OKR Examples 

Objective 2: Maximize Performance and Efficiency of the Support Team

Key Results: 

– Ensure that the team attends at least three training sessions every month

– Organize business communication programs for new joiners 

– Conduct weekly team huddle meetings to discuss issues faced by team members

Objective 3: Increasing Customer Product Adoption Through Exemplary Customer Service

Key Results:

– Resolve customer onboarding issues within 2 hours

– Provide product updates while resolving issues

– Inform every customer regarding upcoming services and updates that are relevant to them

Also Read: Wondering How To Set OKRs For The Engineering Team?

Also Read: OKRs For Healthcare Professionals

Customer Support OKR Examples 

Objective 4: Reduce The Turnaround Time and Provide Resolution within SLA (Service Level Agreement)

Key Results:

– Critical issues response time should be one hour and resolved within a day

– Each member of the customer support team resolves eight customer issues every day

– Standardize or automate solutions for five similar issues every quarter

– All customer complaints receive a response within 48 hours 

Production OKR Examples

Objective 5:  Help Customers get Maximum value from the product

Key Results:

– Smooth onboarding and training of all new customers

– Communicate issues and bugs on time to all existing customers

– Schedule downtime and maintenance activities on weekends

Conclusion

OKRs are a time-tested tool that is being used by numerous Fortune 500 organizations to keep track of their most important organizational goals. We hope the OKRs for customer success discussed in this article will help you get started with goal setting in your organization.

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