The holiday season has a lot to offer – from one side, hundreds of new customers, orders and revenue, while from another point of view, it may cause a lot of mess, problems and stress if the support team isn’t ready.
What can you do to improve your customer support during the 2020 holiday season?
Plan and forecast well in advance
Foremost, you should check the numbers of orders, sales, tickets and other data from the previous year. We recommend you divide the peaks of the season by occasions – Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas and New Year. Then, you will have a clearer picture to plan the number of staff, inventory and contingency plans you will need for each peak of the season.
Organize staff trainings
The worst case scenario is prone to occur if your staff is not ready to handle the incoming flood of calls, requests and orders, from customers who are all willing to purchase. Despite the fact that everybody knows about holiday hassles, customers are still quite strict in judgments about quality of your service. It’s better to be prepared for all kind of situations and ensure that knowledgeable people are available in various departments.
Use multiple channels to lessen customer volume
The best thing you can do is to add more communication channels to cover greater number of customers willing to buy and at the same time improve their experience.
However, you should ensure these new communication channels are clearly presented on your internet resources. The critical success factor when choosing this option of widening points of contact is to provide enough staff to cover all of them.
Self-service is a life vest
Imagine that you have a platform that answers 30% or more of questions and rapidly responds to tickets. If you have a smart customer support portal like Freshdesk for example, it can replace 10-20 members of your staff.
It looks like an easy and effective solution, and it is! Yet, you just need to make sure that your support portal is 100% compatible with various mobile devices and the navigation is super simple. As a result, the investments into a self-service customer support portal will return surprisingly fast and this tool will stay with you forever.
Let your customer service agents answer vital questions or those which require personal attention and allow your customers to find answers to the most common and basic questions themselves.
You can check more insights about improving customer support portal during holidays on the Freshdesk blog.
Come up with a challenge to motivate your customer support staff during the holidays
Every day it’s getting hotter and the stress level goes higher for your staff. Therefore, if you can organize a game or challenge that would be fun for your team, you can considerably help them stay proactive and motivated during rough times.
It’s also important to think about the rewards that would be worth fighting for. Ideally, you can bound individual score to the KPIs or other numbers from your statistic justifying effectiveness. This little fun feature can turn a stressful horror into an ambitious challenge.
We hope that these hints for customer support can be helpful for your company and enable you get the highest scores along with revenue during holidays.