7 Tips to Manage Customer Service During the Holiday Season

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It’s that time of the year again; when everyone is packing up to go visit their families and spend some time together. But that’s not what the holiday season is like for businesses. It can get quite stressful for them as well as for the customers. Customers get worried that their items aren’t being delivered to their homes, the internet connection has suddenly stopped working, cannot find certain products, and whatnot; the complaints are endless.

Given the nature of holidays, it is inevitable. They are also most likely to post reviews about how brands treated them and their issues during these stressful times.

An excellent initiative, the whole purpose of this round-the-clock service is so that customers can reach out to Xfinity at any time of the day when issues arise. When employees consider their customer’s needs, the customers feel satisfied and are very likely to spread positive words about the brand. Xfinity customer service is available 24/7 at https://www.localcabledeals.com/xfinity/customer-service.

Hence, during the holiday season, you need to be extra careful about the kind of services you provide to your customers so that they can keep the crowd coming to your brand.

7 Tips for Customer Service Teams During the Holidays

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Since the holiday season comes once a year, it isn’t like every other day where you can apply your existing strategy of providing customer service. Rather you need to ramp up your customer service game because you cannot afford to lose your customers. Hence, you need a different plan. Consider the following tips:

  • If you have been doing this year after year, then it is also a good idea to look at the previous years’ metrics to get a better understanding of how you can develop a new strategy for customer experience in the new year.
  • In the midst of your busy days, keep tracking your social media platforms for any of the customers’ queries and reviews about your products or services. You need to have a team that monitors these activities so that they can address any problematic reviews as soon as possible or respond appreciatively to any positive ones.
  • Develop knowledge bases and keep them updated so that customers can easily find information on how to use your products or services. Customers like to feel that they can resolve the issue by themselves; give them this chance. What’s more, this will save time for your customer service team and allow them to focus on other pressing matters.
  • Another feature you need to consider is omnichannel support. All your interactions with customers across emails, live chats, social media DMs, etc. should be weaved together to create each customer’s profile. That will prevent your employees from getting orders wrong or scrambling through the channels looking to find the right information about a particular customer.
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  • Your customer service teams should manage the customers’ expectations. They need to communicate to them the response times during the holidays. And within those response times, your customer service teams need to deal with the customers’ issues as proactively as possible.
  • Along with managing your customers’ expectations, your customer service team also needs to prioritize your customers’ requests on the basis of who asked first. Such a technique will allow your customer service agents to give their undivided attention to pressing issues rather than focus on the ones that have a lower impact. Segregate the customers’ requests as urgent and not-so-urgent.
  • Moreover, it is inevitable that there will be certain customers or issues that need escalation, no matter how much you train your customer support teams. As a result, there needs to be an escalation plan in place, where your customer support agents are aware that they should direct an issue to another agent if they feel that it is beyond their scope of resolving it. They also might need a solution that they do not have access to, which is why they need their managers’ permission. Hence, they need to be aware of the steps needed to quickly escalate the matter and then have it resolved.

Out of all these tips, another important tip for brands like yourself, working during the holiday season, is that you need to think like a customer i.e. consider the scenario from their perspective. When you create a visual based on customers’ interaction with your brand, you start to see where the problem might be from their point of view. Apply this in all scenarios where you are catering to your customers’ needs.

Don’t Forget About Your Customer Service Team

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While it is good that your brand is making sure to be available for customers during the holidays, let’s not forget your employees i.e. your customer service team, who are made to work in these times. Following are some of the ways you can appreciate the holiday workers as their employees;

Allow Them WFH

If it is possible, allow your employees to work from home. They deserve this much to make up for working during the holidays when they should be spending time with their families as well.

Days-Off

Since they are working during the holidays, your employees should be given days off during non-busy times.

Overtime Pay

If you are making them work long hours to cater to your customers’ needs, they also need to be paid for the extra hours they put in. And money is known to be a terrific motivator, so how about using it to encourage them to work longer hours during the holidays?

Keeping all these ideas in mind, your brand needs to make sure that they are not neglecting its employees and their performance as a customer service team. After all, they’re the frontline warriors of your brand, dealing with customers during the holiday seasons.

Wrapping Up: You Are All Ready For The Holiday Rush!

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If you are following through this list, your customer service team should be reading for the holidays! If this is your first year dealing with the holiday rush, remember that it is totally okay to not get it all right the first time. Wading through mistakes and making improvements for those in the next year is better than troubleshooting during the season. Just let your customers know that their concerns are definitely being taken seriously.