TOP 5 TIPS FOR HANDLING CUSTOMERS DURING HOLIDAY SEASON

The holiday season is that particular time of the year when a business can gain unbelievable profits. However, these days the competition among businesses is high and customers have unreasonably high service expectations, especially during the holiday rush. In order to stand out from the crowd and maximize your holiday efforts, you need to consider the following tactics:

Plan a strategy based upon previous year’s trends:

This is the first and the most important tactic for providing an impeccable customer service during the holiday season. It states that you need to plan a killer strategy based upon the previous year’s metrics. So, you are required to go through the previous year’s trends and determine factors such as:

i) how much personnel and tools you need on hand for the peak seasonal demand

ii) what to expect and a lot more, based upon some simple reporting and forecasting efforts.

Considering these metrics, a strategy can be planned so as to combat problems that may occur in the holiday rush. Further, the agents can be trained efficaciously and educated about the techniques that help provide an exceptional customer service.

Offer self-service to customers:

As a matter of fact, the holiday season puts a lot of stress not only on the customer service teams but on customers as well. Therefore, during peak hours, the average handle times often shoots upward and wait times escalate leaving many customers frustrated. This frustration can be avoided by providing customers with the resources they need to solve their own queries. Offering self-service facility to the customers enables you to serve more customers faster simply by making answers to common questions readily available to them through an online support center. This eliminates the need for waiting in queues, saves their time and shoots up the level of customer satisfaction.

Provide multichannel support:

Customers, these days, are tech savvy. They can search for the answer on your website, use chat, take advantage of remote support or even ask on social media. This calls for the identification of the right balance of technology and interpersonal skills. Providing a multichannel support to the customers not only eliminates the hassle during the holiday season but also helps save customers’ time, hence, keeping them happy.

Strive to provide faster problem resolution:

In order to provide a faster problem resolution, companies can consider prioritizing the cases. This allows the agents to instantly respond to easy, one-touch-resolution cases and escalate the higher priority ones that require more time and patience. Businesses can consider responding to cases with links to their knowledge base giving customers the opportunity to solve their issues on their own. Businesses can empower agents to solve cases by providing them an access to the resources they need. This eliminates the need of agents asking permissions from their manager and enables them to resolve customer queries in a faster and better way.

Mention an efficacious policy:

There are instances where customers make unreasonable demands, exhibit abusive behavior or threaten to expose you on social media! In order to combat such situations, organizations need to have a clear policy of when to draw the line. Generally, this threshold is met when the costs of serving the customer substantially outweigh the benefits received. Having an efficacious policy helps avoid such nasty instances during the holiday season and maintain smooth customer relationships.

Source: http://www.livechatagent.com/2017/04/27/handling-customers-holiday-season/