Delivering a Jolly Customer Experience for the Holidays
How to anticipate and meet rising customer needs during the most wonderful — and terrifying — time of the year.
As the holidays are quickly approaching, children dreaming of their Christmas splendour no doubt already have visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads. Contact centre agents, on the other hand, likely have nightmarish anticipations of overwhelming contact volume, heightened customer tensions and a need for optimal customer support unparalleled by any other time of the year.
According to a recent study by online employment centre CareerBuilder, 43% of retailers plan to hire additional staff for the holiday season, and of those seasonal positions, 40% are customer service.
Creating the Christmas customer experience that will send your team soaring into the New Year at a high requires maximizing agent productivity and making customer service easier for clients to access than ever. Here are a few tips for delivering the ultimate Christmas customer experience.
Around-the-Clock Multichannel Assistance
Online shopping means that clients now need customer assistance 24/7, not only during business hours. This means making sure that your agents have around-the-clock availability. If this is not possible due to infrastructure, consider calling on a third party contact centre support service. At a minimum, make sure that your customers can easily find your hours of availability and receive a prompt response once business opens for the day.
Catering to the modern customer’s needs also means operating on multiple channels of communication. Expecting customers to take the extra step of going to the phone and calling your contact centre is becoming an increasingly out-dated mode of service.
A recent study by Econsultancy, a digital business and marketing firm, found that 33% of customers prefer to contact a company through social media than by phone. To make matters even more urgent, a whopping 71% of online customers expect assistance within five minutes of reaching out to a company.
Consider these alternate methods of delivering comprehensive and effective customer service:
- Live chat offered directly from your company’s website to connect online consumers with agents
- SMS to update customers about the status of their inquiry, answer frequently asked questions, or provide an expected call back time
- Email exchanges with live clients
- A self-service system in the form of an FAQ based on your most commonly asked questions last holiday season
Divide and Conquer
As contact centre inboxes flood with customer emails, each requiring individual support, agents can become easily overwhelmed and discouraged. Rather than sending agents into their inboxes braced for battle, create an automated system of filtering emails with specific keywords, like “lost password,” “exchange,” or “please help” into separate folders.
Then, design smaller teams full of the strongest agents for each category to tackle each cluster. Making use of each agent’s strongest points can increases agent confidence and productivity, plus briefing agents on the type of inquiry they can expect from their customers will help ensure that they are fully equipped to meet customer needs.
Reply On the Go
The Christmas season results in more personal downtime than usual as consumerism is at its peak and queues, whether in the Starbucks drive-through, the grocery store or the shopping mall, are longer than ever.
Help your agents cross simple tasks off their to-do lists during these moments of downtime by encouraging them to reply to customer emails from their mobile device throughout the day
In addition to customer replies, agents can still make use of the time by categorizing or assigning cases, updating case statuses and tagging individual cases with reminders or notes.
Make Use of a Third Party Support System
One of the most common solutions to overwhelming volume in the contact centre is to make use of a third party. Third party contact centre agents are specially trained to use your contact centre’s script and policies to assist you with workforce management and high contact volume.
Contact centre infrastructure doesn’t always allow for additional staffing only for the holiday season. Using a third party with 24/7 support in both official languages can be an excellent way to gain extra support temporarily without creating extra overhead. Once the holiday season is over, you can transition back to your normal workforce with a well-managed client base and free of any lingering deficits.
Creating the ultimate Christmas customer experience doesn’t have to be tricky and unpredictable. By understanding the trends and preferences of modern consumers, you can ensure that your agents are willing and able to meet their needs. For more information on how to deliver customer assistance for the holidays, download our free white paper.
