Businesses generally, and retailers specifically, are about to enter a period that can best be described as the holiday rush.
Martie de Beer, contact centre executive at Telviva
High volumes, which started over the Black Friday period, will persist through the festive season. The challenge for businesses during this period is to manage the subsequent increase in customer interactions while maintaining high levels of customer service.
And so, as the period offers businesses the chance to attract, delight and retain customers, there’s also a risk that poor customer service and contact centre frustration does the opposite. Here are some practical tips for businesses to handle peak periods such as these effectively:
- Plan for the surge – There is no substitute for meticulous planning. By using multi-channel workforce management tools businesses can analyse their historical data to predict their staffing needs for the busy season. This approach means that businesses will have adequate staff numbers during particularly high-volume periods such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday or Christmas Eve. Access to, and analysis of, historical data on these days enables businesses to plan accurately.
- Empower your agents – Giving your contact centre agents as much contextual knowledge as possible is crucial. With the right tools, agents can quickly access accurate information, which provides a personalised experience for customers while enabling faster response times and higher first contact resolution rates. Quickly, and positively resolved queries make for happy customers. The opposite is also true.
- Invest in self-service options – Implementing user-friendly self-service options goes a long way towards helping businesses manage high-volume contact centres. These include conversational chatbots, step-by-step guides and even video tutorials for common issues. If customers are able to find more generic answers quickly and on their own, it reduces pressure on the customer service teams during busy periods. Of course, if a customer cannot find a resolution he or she needs to be able to switch to an agent, empowered with knowledge and context, seamlessly.
- Consistency and personalisation – Customers have choice and so a good customer experience gives them a reason to keep choosing your business. Consistent messaging across all channels, that is personalised, improves the customer experience. The capability to leverage customer data to make relevant suggestions, or just to be able to greet a customer by name, goes a long way towards building consistency in how a customer interacts with the business.
- Close the loop – While this may seem obvious, it builds trust and improves brand perception. Once an interaction is over, follow up with a customer to ensure their issue has been resolved to their satisfaction. In a competitive environment, a customer will remember a brand that cares about them.
- Understand the correlation between agent performance, cost and customer experience – Agents are human, meaning it is crucial to acknowledge the impact of high-stress periods. This ties to the importance of planning. Overworked agents are not going to handle calls well which has a direct impact on customer satisfaction. There’s an important interplay between agent performance, operational costs, and customer experience. Well-trained, fresh, motivated agents can significantly improve customer satisfaction while reducing costs through their efficient handling of customer interactions. Factors like coaching, career planning, and manageable work hours directly impact agent performance, which in turn affects handling time, first contact resolution, and ultimately, customer satisfaction.
- Choose the right partner – By now it is clear that a well-functioning contact centre needs to have the right tools, system and management in place. Whether it is the ability to leverage the best omnichannel tools or the need to engage in a contact centre as a service model (CCaaS), the value of partnering with a provider who offers advanced tools and expertise in contact centre management cannot be overstated. Working with the right partner will enable businesses to effectively measure customer satisfaction, agent performance, interaction volumes and the effectiveness of self-service tools, among much more. This enables a business to make good, data-driven decisions to improve customer service, especially during peak periods and holiday rushes.