It’s that time of the year when businesses begin to prepare for the holiday rush. With the pressure many people feel to participate in every family, work, or social function, stress levels may be especially high and unfortunately, customer support teams occasionally are the recipients of the stress people are feeling. To keep customers and your support team happy, here are some tactics businesses can use to prepare for the holiday rush.
1. Audit your current support
What are your support times now for customer support and live chat? Does the team resolve inquiries quickly or does it take several days? Understanding where you may have a gap in support is something to address well before December 25th. As you audit how your team works now, you may discover steps in support that can be cut out or that you need to hire some short-term contract workers to meet the holiday demand. You also want to review how your support systems worked last year during the holidays to see if there are some lessons learned to apply this season.
2. Have internal priority flags
When customers submit a support request, some companies will include a drop-down for low, medium, or high to indicate the priority. If you don’t have this in place – or even if you do – define what the priorities are internally. Not everything will be obvious in terms of priority, such as “Delivery by December 24th” with an order that was placed on December 23rd, so your support team needs to be well-trained to understand the priorities for your business.
3. Ramp up your self-service support
Nothing is more frustrating to a customer than not being able to easily reach support when they have a problem. Yet others prefer to find the answer to their question on your site without having to reach out to customer support at all. Ask your support reps to answer questions via phone, email, or chat, then incorporate that information into a public knowledgebase. This self-service may cut down on the number of support calls.
4. Trust your support team
Your team needs to be empowered all year long to make judgment calls with your customers, but this is even more important during the holiday rush. If reps have to regularly escalate cases because they do not have the authority to resolve an issue in a certain way on their own, that will put even more pressure on the whole team.
5. Remember to use empathy
When customers are rude to your customer support team, remind your team that this is not even about them at all. People are stressed out this time of the year and unfortunately, customer support teams bear the brunt of these frustrations. This may be a good time for a refresher training on how to deal with difficult customers.
6. Have an internal contest
Customers may be stressed this time of the year, but so is your customer support team. Is there something you can do to make it fun for them during the holidays? Perhaps a contest where they earn points for cases that are solved to a customer’s satisfaction? Remember that some of these customers are only with you for these couple months, but your team is there all year long and needs to be appreciated.
In addition to the above, remember that it’s the holidays which are a time of celebration! Plan time for yourself to celebrate and remember to also take care of yourself at the end of the day.
Make sure that your business is ready for all the holidays can bring by making the switch to HappyFox Customer Support Software. Schedule a One-on-One personalized product demo today.
