OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is a marketing methodology, which can help marketing teams to track and achieve their goals. However, you don’t have to be in charge of a marketing team to make use of OKRs—more or less any area of business can benefit from their use, including customer success teams.

Since your business’s customer success team is responsible for helping customers to achieve their goals, OKRs can come in very handy. OKRs can help them make your company more valuable in the eyes of your customers and target audience. This post will explore this topic further, exploring why your customer success team needs to use OKRs.

More Transparency

OKRs will help your company to achieve greater transparency. Every department should have its own OKRs, from customer service OKRs to marketing ones. Your customer success team should also have their own. The reason that OKRs help different departments to achieve greater transparency is that they outline a department’s goals and desired outcomes. Since different departments don’t tend to communicate unless there is a good reason for them to do so, OKRs will help them to find out what’s going on with one another. You can distribute each team’s OKRs through email to all other departments. Your company’s departments can then start working together to help each other to achieve their goals.

Performance Tracking

One of the main reasons that OKRs are so useful is because they help companies to track their performance. Your company’s success team plays a very important role in ensuring that customers are treated well. Arguably, they are one of your company’s most important departments. Because of this, you should constantly be working toward improving their performance. The best way to improve a department’s performance is to track it. You will be able to identify things that they are doing wrong, and also areas that they are succeeding in. You should appoint a specific staff member for the role of tracking each department’s OKRs and reporting back to you because it can be a lot of work.

Decision-making

When you know how each department is performing, it’s a lot easier to make decisions. It’s also worth noting that by using  OKRs, individual departments will be able to make more effective decisions. Your customer success team will be able to monitor their own performance and identify things that need improvement, which they can do themselves. Using  OKRs will help your customer success team to make much better decisions. It will also give them a goal to align themselves with, which they can work towards, thereby helping to improve team morale.

Staff Productivity

Staff productivity can be very hard to measure. However, when you begin using OKRs, you will notice all of a sudden that it’s a lot easier to track your staff’s performance and productivity on an individual basis. This is because OKR updates will include information about each team member’s performance, how they are working, and what they can do to improve. It should also be noted that because staff are being monitored more, they are bound to become a lot more productive. Something else you should know is that by creating consistent measurable goals for your team, you are giving them something to work toward, which will motivate them and should improve their performance.

Achieving Goals

As a business owner, it is crucial that you have goals in place for each department to work toward. As mentioned previously, your customer success team is a very important department, and therefore, should have clear goals written down for it to work toward. When you write down what you want a department to achieve, you give them something measurable and tangible to work toward. OKRs will also help you to identify which departments are achieving the goals that you have set for them and which aren’t. This will give you the ability to identify departments that need improvement.

Giving Direction

OKRs will give your company direction as a whole. As mentioned earlier, each department should be notified of all other departments’ goals. By doing this, you are able to align everybody, so that they are working towards the same thing. A clearer direction will inevitably increase your staff’s performance. When staff are working with no goal in sight, it can be very hard for them to motivate themselves. When they have a goal, however, they will naturally work a lot harder, because the finish line is in view, and they know what they are trying to achieve.

Managing a business can be made a lot easier by using OKRs. OKRs help each department to develop measurable and visible goals, not to mention identify any areas that need to be improved. Your customer success team is a very important team, and therefore, can benefit tremendously from the use of OKRs.