How the FIT model gets your team to love SMART goals

Do your customer service goals inspire the team?

If not, the FIT model might be the cure. It helps you write goals that give your team clarity, inspire teamwork, and encourage the right behaviors.

The FIT goal model also makes costly incentives, prizes, and leaderboards completely unnecessary. In fact, the model works by getting rid of all that nonsense.

This post outlines the three elements of the FIT goal model, how to use it, and why it's so effective at motivating customer service employees.

Types of customer service goals

Generally speaking, there are three common types of customer service goals.

1. Squishy

2. SMART

3. SMART + FIT

Squishy goals are too unclear to be useful. For example:

Improve customer service.

This goal is extremely squishy. It doesn't explain what needs to be done or how people will know if the goal has been accomplished.

The SMART model adds some much-needed structure that can instantly improve a squishy goal. SMART is an acronym that stands for five things:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Attainable

• Relevant

• Time-bound

Here's how that squishy "improve customer service" goal might look if you re-wrote it using the SMART model:

Customer service reps who achieve a 90% average satisfaction rating on the customer satisfaction survey by the end of the month will earn a $100 bonus.

This goal is much clearer now. But there’s also a problem.

Will employees see the goal as improving customer satisfaction or earning the $100 bonus? Those aren’t the same thing. There are lots of underhanded ways to improve survey scores without actually improving customer service. (Curious? Here are nine techniques.)

You can prevent those issues by making your SMART goals FIT.

What is the FIT goal model?

The FIT goal model can enhance your SMART goals. It helps you get more buy-in from employees to do the right thing and achieve results.

There are three elements that make up the acronym, FIT:

• Focus attention. FIT goals encourage the right behaviors.

• Intrinsic motivation. Tap into your employee's internal desire to serve.

• Team-oriented. FIT goals encourage teamwork, not individualism.

One customer service team used the FIT model to improve its SMART goals by doing three things:

First, the manager focused attention by reviewing survey feedback on a daily basis and discussing opportunities for improvement. This made it clear the goal was better service, not a better survey score.

Next, there was no incentive or reward attached to the goal. It relied on employees' intrinsic motivation to provide great service.

Finally, it was team-oriented because there was one goal for the entire team.

The FIT model encouraged a lot of behaviors you wouldn't normally see with individual SMART goals.

For example, customers were frustrated when they were transferred from the Tier 1 support team to Tier 2 when the issue was a simple one.

On their own initiative, Tier 1 and Tier 2 employees identified five common transfers that could be avoided by giving the Tier 1 team just a little more information.

Transfers instantly went down, which also reduced wait times for customers who needed to speak to a Tier 2 agent. Customer survey scores increased due to the improved service.

How to use the FIT goal model

Let's break this down a bit to see how each component can improve your SMART goals.

Step 1: Set a SMART goal

This embarrassingly amateur video explains how:

You can use this worksheet to help you.

Here’s an example of a SMART goal from a project I worked on. My client was an airport that installed self-service machines that customers could use to pay for their parking fee.

Achieve a daily average of 80% of parking customers using self-service technology to pay for parking by December 31.

Step 2: Focus attention

The next step is to focus your team’s attention on the right behaviors. Here are a few discussion questions that can help:

• Why is this SMART goal important?

• How is the goal relevant to the mission and/or strategy?

• What do employees need to do to achieve the goal?

Share that with the team, and then talk about it a lot.

The airport counted on self-service machines to reduced operating costs. Usage needed to be at 80% for the airport managers to achieve their budget goal.

Airport parking managers focused the attention by explaining this to the team when they shared the goal.

Step 3: Find intrinsic motivators

Connect the goal to things your employees care about. Avoid using external motivators such as incentives, since those can cause employees to focus on the prize rather than service.

Parking managers relied on intrinsic motivation by connecting the airport’s self-service goal to employees' genuine desire to serve.

Customers could save time and money by using the machines. They could by-pass the cashier line if they paid for their parking at a kiosk which allowed them to exit faster. Using the kiosk gave customers a 20-minute grace period to exit the garage, which often saved them a few dollars on their parking fee.

Employees were stationed by banks of self-service machines to explain these benefits and guide customers through using them. (This project happened at a time when self-service kiosks were relatively new.)

Almost everyone approached this work enthusiastically and enjoyed providing customers with extra assistance.

Step 4: Promote teamwork

Having a SMART goal for the entire team encourages more teamwork. You can enhance that in a few ways:

• Hold regular meetings to discuss progress and challenges.

• Encourage employees to experiment with new ideas.

• Share best practices via team meetings or knowledge bases.

The airport parking goal was team-oriented because the entire team was focused on the same goal.

Employees were encouraged to try new approaches. Managers held regular team huddles where employees could come together and discuss their ideas.

The results were tremendous.

Employees overwhelmingly bought in to the goal and hit the 80% target in just 8 months. The airport was ecstatic because they hit their budget goal and could now boast the best self-service usage rate of any airport in the country.

Take Action

SMART goals should be table stakes for any customer service team. You can get even better results by applying the FIT model.

Here's a short video from my Leading a Customer-Focused Culture course that provides more information about setting good goals.

Set good goals from Leading a Customer-Centric Culture by Jeff Toister

Five reasons why we struggle to achieve our goals

I talk to a lot of people who are trying to improve customer service.

It's a diverse group, including CEOs, executives, middle managers, team leads, and frontline employees. Their challenges are individual, but they all struggle.

Many have received conflicting advice. It's hard to know where to start.

Fortunately, I've done the research for you. Peter Gollwitzer, a professor in the Psychology Department at New York University, gave me a treasure trove of studies on achieving goals.

I've combined them with my own experience talking to thousands of customer service professionals.

Here are the top five reasons why we don't achieve our goals (and what you can do about it.)

Reason #1: Your goals are too vague

An analysis of 422 scientific studies involving 82,107 participants found that having a clear goal accounted for 28 percent of success.

Let's do a demonstration. Grab your phone and open up the maps app. Ask the app to give you directions to a generic restaurant.

Not a specific place. A generic restaurant.

Obviously, that doesn't work. The app even makes helpful suggestions in an attempt to get you to make a decision.

We face the same problem when it comes to achieving goals—it's impossible to get started without a specific destination.

The fix is simple: set concrete goals.

Imagine shipping delays are your biggest source of customer complaints. Your on-time rate is 85 percent, which means 15 out of 100 orders are late. Process 1,000 orders per day and you're getting 150 daily complaints.

A goal to "reduce complaints" is too squishy.

Order delivery is the real problem in this scenario. A more specific goal, such as "reduce late deliveries by 50 percent in 30 days" would make it much easier to get started and track your progress.

Need help crafting specific goals? Trying using this guide.

Reason #2: Not starting

It’s exhilarating to set a challenging goal. That’s as far as many people get. Many never get started making progress toward achieving it.

Sometimes, we tell ourselves we're too busy.

One executive created a set of ambitious goals at an executive retreat. She promptly set her goals aside the moment she returned to the office. "We have a lot going on right now," she told me. "We're just trying to catch up."

Other times, we just forget.

A customer service rep attended a workshop on serving angry customers. That was a Thursday. He didn't encounter an upset customer until the following Monday, when his old behaviors instinctively kicked in and the lessons learned in training were lost.

The solution is to create a specific plan to get started.

One study on goal completion discovered that just 22 percent of participants completed a difficult goal when they did not have a plan. That number rose to 62 percent when participants created an action plan.

Reason #3: You get derailed

It's hard to block out distractions when you're trying to achieve a goal. Old habits are hard to break. Conflicts arise between new goals and existing routines.

A CEO delegated a service culture initiative to his leadership team. They got started with a lot of fanfare, but the CEO never checked in on them.

Instead, he kept piling on new projects and assignments. The team prioritized the new work and the service culture initiative was soon set aside.

It's not just a lack of checking in that derails our project. Customer service professionals are overly tired and distracted.

The solution is to identify your own blindspots and solve for them ahead of time.

For example, I do my best writing in the morning, but I know checking email and social media will distract me. So I start the day by writing and don't check messages until mid-morning.

Reason #4: You don't recognize a bad plan

Some plans are destined to fail. And when that realization sets in, many of us instinctively stick with the plan.

One executive lamented about how much time his team had spent on a failed initiative. He was determined to press on, even though it wasn't working.

He struggled to get over the time and effort already spent.

A customer service manager invested in new technology for her team. The technology made things worse, not better. The manager stuck with it anyway because she felt she had to justify the expense.

Don't be afraid to reset when you see your plan isn't working. That's why I recommend doing regular business reviews.

Reason #5: You get overextended

We're overwhelmed with initiatives, projects, and to-do items. More gets added constantly. Interruptions never end.

Take a look at your own to-do list. Ask yourself these questions:

• What will actually get done today?

• How many items get bumped or ignored?

• How many items will get added to the list?

For many of us, this simple analysis makes it clear why we fail. We're trying to do too much.

One executive created a host of committees to improve customer service. There was a culture committee, a customer obsession committee, an operational excellence committee, and an employee engagement committee.

Nobody knew exactly where one committee started and the other ended. They didn't have clear goals, but they did have endless meetings.

Nothing got done.

Focusing on one thing at a time is the counterintuitive solution to getting more done. One client of mine, Clio, won an award for best contact center culture by relentlessly focusing on one step at a time. Leaders would not move on to the next initiative until the last initiative was completed.

Conclusion

We can achieve more goals. Set your next customer service initiative up for success by addressing these questions:

1. What is the goal?

2. What is my plan to achieve it?

3. How can I make the goal easier to achieve?

4. When will I review my plan?

5. Why is this goal a priority?

How to Create Good Customer Service Goals

Advertising disclosure: We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

"I have six minutes to solve their problem, and it's not enough time."

The technical support agent was sharing her struggle with her contact center's talk time goal. She was expected to average six minutes per phone call, regardless of the call's complexity. 

It was especially difficult, she explained, when the customer was really upset and she had to choose between helping the customer feel better and just telling the customer what to do.

The six minute goal was intended to motivate employees like this agent to work more efficiently. The real impact was it caused her stress and negatively impacted the service she provided.

Customer service teams have a lot of goals. Here's how to write ones that will help drive the right performance.

Hallmarks of Bad Goal

Customer service leaders often struggle to set goals that drive the right behaviors.

One customer service team leader wanted employees to focus on outstanding customer service, so he set this goal:

Customer service representatives who earn a satisfied rating on 95 percent or more of their customer service surveys each month will receive a $100 bonus.

The result was exactly the opposite of great service. Employees engaged in survey begging to directly ask customers for a good rating. A few even learned to transfer upset customers to colleagues in another department so they wouldn't risk getting dinged with a poor survey score.

Look carefully at that goal and you can see it has three hallmarks that are common among bad goals:

1. It diverted attention away from customer service.

2. It rewarded individualism.

3. It relied on extrinsic motivation.

Employees on this team weren't trying to provide great service, they were trying to earn the bonus. So whenever there was a conflict between good service and earning the bonus, the employees would try to earn the bonus.

The goal also promoted individualism, which caused employees to undermine their colleagues by transferring angry customers to them.

Finally, the $100 bonus was a form of intrinsic motivation. The employees cared about the incentive, not about the customer in this scenario.

The Good Goal Criteria

I noticed an interesting trend while researching customer-focused companies for The Service Culture Handbook.

Most companies I profiled used goals, but they approached them very differently than most organizations. For example, one company I worked with had this customer service survey goal:

The team will earn a satisfied rating on 85 percent of customer service surveys by the end of this month.

This goal met the three criteria of good customer service goals:

1. It focused attention on customer service.

2. It rewarded teamwork.

3. It relied on intrinsic motivation.

Let's break this down a bit, starting with focus. The team's leader reviewed survey feedback with her team on a regular basis. The review sessions weren't focused on the score; rather they consistently looked for opportunities to improve as a team and were naturally motivated to improve service.

Some opportunities were out of the team's control, such as an issue with one of the company's products. In this case, the team leader took the feedback to the product development team so they had clear data to guide future improvements.

Other opportunities were within the team's control. Since the entire team shared the same goal, they were motivated to help each other.

For example, one common complaint were calls that had to be escalated from a tier one team that handled basic requests to a tier two team that handled more complicated issues. Customers didn't like being transferred and sometimes grew even more frustrated when they had to wait on hold.

So the tier one and tier two teams looked at the top reasons for transferring a call and identified several that could be prevented just by giving the tier one team a little extra information.

This behavior wouldn't have happened if the two teams were competing for individual rewards.

I've also noticed customer-focused leaders rarely use incentives. That's because realize customer service employees are generally motivated to provide great customer service. Incentives only get in the way.

Take Action

Try evaluating your team's customer service goals agains the good goal criteria:

1. Do they focus attention on customer service?

2. Do they reward teamwork?

3. Do they rely on intrinsic motivation?

For some advanced work:

• Explore the distinction between goals and KPIs.

• You can even use this worksheet to set SMART goals.

Goal Setting Mistakes That Will Crush Your Service Culture

The new executive looked with dismay at the list of strategic goals the CEO had shared. They were designed to help the organization create a service culture, yet she knew the list was not very strategic nor did it contain actual goals.

One goal was "provide customer service training for employees." Merely ticking the box to show she completed the training task wasn't going to create a service culture. 

The CEO either didn't understand or didn't care since the goals had already been shared with the board. His chief concern was making sure the training happened sometime during the fiscal year.

Unfortunately, this executive is not alone. I periodically ask individuals and leaders to share their goals with me; they are rarely well-written. 

Goals are intended to focus behavior and motivate people to give extra effort towards achieving them. Good goals can reinforce a service culture by getting everyone to work together towards a specific achievement.

In many cases, poorly-conceived goals can crush a service culture by focusing employees on uninspiring tasks such as "provide customer service training." 

Here are five common goal setting mistakes and how to avoid them.

Five Common Goal Setting Mistakes

Look carefully and you'll see these are all connected to the SMART goal model. Here's a quick review:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Attainable

• Relevant

• Time-bound

Mistake #1: Not Specific

Goals are often written in vague terms that make it difficult to understand exactly what the organization or team is trying to achieve. Here are some real examples:

• "Improve customer service"

• "Continue drive towards standardization"

• "Increase support capability"

Vague, non-specific goals don't effectively focus behavior that because people aren't really sure what "improve customer service" means.

The fix is to make it specific. For instance, think of why you want to improve customer service and what specific impact that might have on the organization. Examples might include:

• Reduce customer churn

• Increase first contact resolution

• Improve the net promoter score (NPS)

Mistake #2: Not Measurable

Many goals lack a specific measurement, which makes it impossible to tell whether or not the goal has been achieved. None of these have a specific number connected to them:

• Reduce customer churn

• Increase first contact resolution

• Improve the NPS score

It's hard to focus our performance if we don't know what counts as success. The fix here is to put a number to it.

• Reduce customer churn by 5 percent

• Increase first contact resolution by 10 percent

• Improve NPS score to 55

Mistake #3: Not Attainable

A stretch goal may get employees to give a little extra effort. When that goal feels completely out of reach, employees may either give up or engage in unethical behavior.

It hurts a service culture when employees stop trying. It kills a service culture when employees do things like enter fake survey results or deliberately alter their numbers.

Wells Fargo provides a recent cautionary tale of what happens when you set unrealistic goals. Thousands of employees collectively opened more than two million phony customer accounts in an effort to meet a sales target of eight financial products per customer.

The fix is to set goals that require some effort to achieve yet are well within reach if employees work hard and execute correctly. Improving the NPS to 55 is probably unrealistic if it sits at -10 right now. It's probably attainable if the current score is 50.

Mistake #4: Irrelevant

Goals can cause problems when they are connected to something other than the customer service vision or the organization's strategic plan.

Here are a few real examples:

• "Improve reporting"

• "Win an award"

• "Expand staff"

Keep in mind that goals are intended to focus behavior. So behavior may focus on something other than the customer service vision or strategic plan if they aren't expressly aligned.

The fix is to choose goals that represent progress towards the customer service vision. One way to do this is by asking the question, "Why?" to a non-aligned goal statement.

For instance:

• Why do you want to improve reporting? Perhaps you want to spot trends more easily. 

• Why do you want to spot trends? So you can identify problems and fix them.

• Why do you want to fix problems? So you can reduce customer churn.

In that case, you might set a SMART goal around reducing customer churn and outline specific ways you want to improve reporting to help you achieve that goal.

Mistake #5: Not Time-Bound

I know a lot of people who want to write a book. Most never do. 

One of the reasons they never do is they don't set a specific time by when that book will be written. That makes it easy to avoid creating any concrete plans. 

My goal was to write a bestselling book in 2017 and I set a book launch date of April 4. Having this specific target caused me to write a detailed action plan designed to help me achieve my goal. And I did—The Service Culture Handbook hit the 800-CEO-READ bestseller list for April.

In a customer service context, let's say you want to reduce repeat contacts by 20 percent. A SMART goal should specify when you hope to achieve this by so you can set some specific plans to get there. For example:

Reduce average monthly repeat customer contacts by 20 percent by July 31, 2018.

Take Action!

One immediate step is to review your goals against the SMART model. You can learn more about SMART goals and download a helpful worksheet here.

If you want to go deeper, make sure your goals align with these good goal characteristics.