In such a scenario, the holiday season presents a number of problems and opportunities for both e-commerce and brick-and-mortar companies. If you’re not careful, an inflow of customer communications can hamper service quality – and you can’t afford to let customer service suffer over these merry days. [/ohio_text]
Start with analyzing the past year’s trend
Check your systems to get a number on last year’s volume of customer cases. Loop in your marketing and sales department to understand the present year’s sales forecast. This will help you get a rough idea of the scale you are about to deal with.
Talk to your care team to better understand what these conversations mostly revolved around to keep ready solutions for speedy delivery.
Also, keep an eye on other patterns such as what channels customers are using most to reach out to your company.
Don’t let different departments work in silos
Make a sound workflow and make it foolproof. Spend time with your customer service representatives to familiarize them with key business processes. They should be informed about every stage of the process, from manufacture to delivery, and everything in between.
Involve different departments to keep the care team informed about important information like expected delivery time, details on how refunds are processed and where they may be stuck, and what kind of discounts or additional services are offered and what is their mode of delivery.
Capture every single opportunity
Because everything appears to be an opportunity, revenue opportunities might be difficult to pinpoint at times. The line begins to blur sooner or later. However, revenue opportunities are more clear and easily targeted over the holidays.
The majority of Christmas campaigns focus on specials and discounts. This means that communications like free shipping, buy one, get one free, bulk discounts, and urgency-related checkout incentives will reap benefits.
Each campaign should be connected to your holiday promotions and communications calendar.
Email segmentation and frequency tactics, unique holiday landing pages, and top-selling product notifications are a few things you can look at.
You should also consider how each campaign and related communications efforts affect your customer service.
Step into your customer’s shoes
You can try to see difficulties through the eyes of your customers. Address their concerns and be ready to respond.
You’ll have an easier time guessing what your customers really desire. However, this is one field in which your customers are likely to know more than you do.
Starting a dialogue with customers is the best strategy to resolve divergent expectations since you know where they’re coming from and what they’re exhibiting interest and intent for.
Conversations, such as live chat, allow you to adjust expectations while also providing a personalized and welcome buying experience.
Help customers Self-Serve
Due to the rush of customer demands around the holidays, your customer support representatives are under a lot of stress. Creating or upgrading a specialised knowledge base might relieve your personnel of some of their responsibilities and allow them to focus on more vital duties.
This simultaneously also empowers your customers to get a speedy resolution for common issues.
Customer service doesn’t have to be a nightmare during the holidays. Commit to concentrating more of your efforts on creating the optimal engagement points, experiences, and income opportunities.