How to Keep your Customer Service Top Notch During the Stressful Holiday Season

5 years ago | Posted in: Articles, Business | 1720 Views

The holiday season is one of the most profitable periods in the year since clients are sentimental and willing to spend money on your product or service. However, due to the huge traffic, it can be stressful to handle your clients. Here is how to keep your customer service top notch during the stressful holiday season:

1. Organize Your Current Resources

One thing you should know as an entrepreneur is that businesses are different. Even when you sell the same services or products or are in the same industry, you must have a unique work ethic, workflows, and team culture.
Look for what you think will work and what will not, as opposed to using a templated approach. In a majority of the cases, success in customer service happens when you efficiently organize customer inquiries, route them to the right persons, escalate issues timely, and give feedback to clients speedily for closure.
For instance, ensure you have set up a system to tag conversations, shift conversations between folders, assign particular roles to particular people, and double check that the tools being used have been paid for to avoid inaccessible logins or suspended accounts.
The objective here is to boost the accuracy and speed of responding to client inquiries. If half of your customers require fast replies to their inquiries, feedback, and issues, it is essential that your current resources can deliver.

  1.  Ensure the Effectiveness of your Tools 

Keep auxiliary tools and apps that integrate with your customer service tools. In case you use a rewards/loyalty app, be sure the co-mingling is running 100 percent. If you are using an email automation tool for your holiday email newsletters, verify that the support addresses and backlinks are all directing to the accurate inboxes for the collected email addresses.
The same idea should be applied to all 3rd party vendors that you depend on for successful transactions. These include shipping and tracking providers, 3rd party e-commerce fulfillment services, payment processors, and other customer support apps. Be sure to remember that the holiday season is no time for shopping for new apps to improve your services. It is also not good to make any unnecessary upgrades or updates to current tools since it results in additional commitment or learning. Most importantly, ensure you are aware of your network visibility so that you can allocate the right bandwidth and avoid hiccups during this essential time.
Reach out to apps and tools you utilize and inquire about their holiday customer service hours to avoid the possibility of their service affecting your capacity to support your clients.

  1. Improve Your Appearance 

It is significant to offer your customers great customer experience during the whole year, and especially during the holidays. This means having a unified customer experience from the point they get to your website to buy your product and from going through your FAQ to receiving a web message or email from the customer service team.
A majority of the times businesses make adjustments to their storefronts without thinking of the effects it will have on the customer’s experience deeper into the buying and loyalty cycle. For instance, if you are running a Facebook campaign for a discount offer on a group of products and clients are redirected to a special landing page on your storefront, it is vital that the landing page communicates the offer. Additionally, your knowledge base or FAQs need to have an article describing the eligibility requirements and details of the offer.

  1.  Improve on Your Messaging 

Messaging is not only about the message, but it is also about the tone. Emotions run wild and tensions are high during the holiday season, and these increase the sensitivity level in client sentiments. It is best to get together as a team and come up with best practices when communicating with your clients during this period. The key to improving messaging is to develop a list of customer inquiries, feedback, and issues. Then develop a scalable way to communicate as much as possible in one response and avoid making it an essay.

Conclusion

These tips will ensure that your customer service is high enough to generate leads, convert them, and maintain customer loyalty. Happy holidays!

by: Dennis Hung

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