This is a guest post from Matt Roberts, co-founder of Zokri.

There’s a reason why strategy frameworks like Balanced Scorecard (BSC) have the ‘Customer’ as the first theme under ‘Financial’. As visitors of this website it will be obvious to you why. Without great, or even amazing Customer Experiences you will find it hard to hit revenue and retention goals.

We’re living in a world where annual planning cycles are just too slow, and because the Balanced Scorecard is based typically on an annual planning cycle it’s either being complimented or replaced by more agile goal setting frameworks like Objectives and Key Results or OKR.

The great thing about OKR is it takes goal setting from a top-down ‘command-and-control’ exercise to one where leaderships teams define the strategy and areas of focus, set high level company objectives, and then invite and empower departments and teams to propose goals that align, are ambitious, and will be committed to. The top-down and bottom-up approach.

The key to great OKR planning and use is to ensure that as a leadership team you make a pillar of your strategy about Customer Experience, and define an Objective and Key Results that would describewhat success looks like.

A good objective is inspiring and feels like a Mission Statement. A good customer orientated objective might be something like:

• Exceptional Customer Experiences At Every Interaction

The ‘as measured by’ part of the OKR is the Key Result. Key Results are designed to ‘measure what matters’, so an important part of any goal planning process is to have the conversations and debates to agree ‘‘what matters’.

At the company level, the annual objective for the year you might use Key Results like:

• Increase NPS from 60 to 75
• Improve our Customer Retention Rate from 85% to 95%
• Increase our CSAT from 82% to 90%

If this was presented as a Company Objective, to departments and teams, they would be asked to discuss and propose OKRs that would align with this and would be the most important and impactful goals they could try and achieve in the next quarter to help outside their business-as-usual (BAU) activities.

The non BAU part really matters. When OKRs are planned well there are not many of them and they are focused on non BAU activities. They are the goals that will be committed to outside BAU that you believe will make a material difference.

Candidate Objectives that might align with the Company Objective will vary by team, but here are some ideas.

• Understand Customer Needs
• Deliver Great Customer Value Faster
• Provide Customer With Way More Choice
• Make What Is Wanted Always In Stock
• Predict Support Needs Before We Are Asked
• Build Deeper Relationships With Customers
• Customers Consider Us As A Long-term Partner
• We Are Satisfying Customers Needs In Record Time

If we take a deeper look at the last objective example: “We Are Satisfying Customers Needs In Record Time”. For a number of businesses with Customer Service teams this will be a big focus. Leading indicators and drivers of CSAT and NPS for insurance companies for example are the reduce the time it takes to settle a claim and provide a high level of post interaction satisfaction.

Importantly, IF this area is an issue, it might become an OKR for the next one or two quarters. If it’s good or good enough right now, KPIs can be tracked and BAU processes will support the maintenance of these metrics. If it is indeed a priority improvement the Key Results might be:

• Reduce the time from claim notification to settlement from 3 days to 1 day
• Achieve a post claim CSAT of 95%

Making the full OKR:

We Are Satisfying Customers Needs In Record Time

• Reduce the time from claim notification to settlement from 3 days to 1 day
• Achieve a post claim CSAT of 95%

The targets are deliberately meant to be hard as hard goals increase focus and inspire new approaches to key challenges and opportunities. The reality is that if 70% of those targets were achieved the Objective would be seen as a success. 100% would of course be amazing.

Which brings me onto another important part of what makes any form of goal setting and achievement better. Physiological safety. It needs to be safe to set ambitious goals and fail. Failure needs to be a learning experience, and everyone in a team needs to have a voice and be heard.

If Customer Experience matters, and of course it really does, I’d argue that OKRs are a good route to go down to achieve the improvements you’re looking for. They empower the whole company to focus on CX and commit to the improvements they can make that will make a difference quarter-on-quarter, when they are not working on their normal business-as-usual work. You can learn more about OKRs at ZOKRI and by searching the web.

This is a guest post from Matt Roberts, co-founder of Zokri.

About Matt

Matt is a tech founder that is on a mission to share the benefits of better goal setting and OKR. His company Zokri offers both goal setting software and education. Providing leadership teams with the knowledge, skills and tools needed to make OKRs work.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay