The planning season has fallen swiftly upon us and our OKRs and SMART goals are in full swing across the board. While it’s well known that most businesses will land on a thoroughly unique set of objectives focused on increasing revenue, efficiency, satisfaction, and engagement - should we consider our customers as something more than a satisfaction or revenue target?
With an increasingly competitive landscape, we have an opportunity, if not obligation, to place customer interests front and center when deciding targets. Shifting the focus away from what we want toward what our customers want might just bring us closer to understanding what we can offer and how to unlock our own organisational growth.
Align business and customer needs
You must not only know thy customer, but also know thyself to identify where your needs align to your customers. Consider your success metrics and customer journey, what does success look like at each stage for your customers? Are you meeting customer needs, or simply advocating for your own needs?
For our first example, it’s likely as a business you want to reduce onboarding times to sooner recognise revenue. On the other side of this, your customers also want to onboard sooner to reduce the time they spend managing change and increase the time they spend receiving value. Cases like this are where we find alignment between the needs of teams, businesses, and customers.
Let’s explore a more support-shaped example. Consider what level of self-service (aka “deflection”) you’re providing to your customers. If your self service is low and first response time reasonably lengthy, increasing your self service immediately reduces team workload and lets customers help themselves quicker. Most customers want greater independence, so this is again an area of alignment.
So how do we do this in practice? Talking with your customers is the first step in finding what scenarios are going to apply for your teams and business. If you’re a support leader and haven’t been to customer meetings recently, get out there. Ride-along to some meetings with your account team. Jump on a video call and ask your customers what really matters to them. Once you have these answers, look at your product and inside the business. Work with leadership to identify those opportunities where customer goals and your goals can come together to better meet what your customers need.
Set the right goals for your team
Once the business has set its top-level targets, you then have to contend with the more support-shaped objectives. What do you and your team need to solve to make this happen? In 2026, “adopt AI” is easily the top priority for most teams, but how do we make goal setting a more meaningful process that accounts for what is beyond today’s shiny new thing?
1. Choose Key Themes
Identify areas that your team contributes to or could contribute to against your top-level targets. Assuming we’re talking a quarter, narrow down on at most three or four key themes, anything more will dilute your immediate direction, and be too much for your team to embrace at once.
Themes can be literal (e.g. AI, AHT, FRT) or more intangible (e.g. Quality, Back To Basics, Voice of Customer). Don’t limit yourself arbitrarily, focus on what stands out for customers and your team.
2. Map Capabilities
Identify what specific capabilities your team has that contribute to your chosen themes. If your focus is “back to basics” what does that look like? Is it ticket and queue management, macro usage, something else?
Explore which parts of your operations and people touch on each theme and narrow down on what capability is likely to offer the most returns.
3. Set Outcomes
Decide on what’s achievable within the quarter. Evaluate the cause & effect on operations, people, and other teams. Explore the opportunities and risks involved. Once you’ve built a rounded view, commit to the outcome you feel is attainable.
4. Identify Potential Owners
Decide who on your team will lead and co-pilot initiatives, as well as who they’ll need to involve. You mightn’t have a final list until you’ve had a chance to discuss it with your team, but it helps to have an idea of who has capacity and interest in working on improvements.
Now go and execute. Involve your leadership team and individual contributors in shaping the implementation and working towards your desired outcomes.
Review your goals at inflection points
With ongoing disruption from emerging technologies, teams should make sure to avoid the “set and forget” approach to planning. Instead they should seek to embrace a regular review rhythm, allowing them to adjust course if needed. Taking this approach allows your team to firmly commit to a direction at a point in time, giving clarity and comfort as to where they should focus their efforts.
An alternative approach we commonly see is leaders avoiding targets altogether when the environment is likely to be subject to rapid change. While this feels best in the short-term and team members can be asked to live with ambiguity, it often erodes confidence and trust in your leadership. I recommend that leaders avoid this and set direction, being willing to adjust it, and support their teams to navigate changing landscapes.
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The criticality of setting effective targets cannot be overstated, both for their purpose in motivating and aligning teams, but also for their ability to bring organisations closer to their customers. By aligning our needs with our customer’s, we can accelerate new sales, adoption, and word-of-mouth that would otherwise take us longer to achieve, or be altogether unattainable.
