Customer service: How to handle holiday rush

Companies with seasonality in their businesses experience an increased number of customer service requests in the holiday season. This is the time when you have the opportunity to create promoters in your customers through swift customer service. However, it is not as simple as it sounds. You’ve to be respectful of your employees’ right to have some time for themselves in the holidays. And not only your employees, but you also can’t detach yourself from the world because of work.

As this is not a new situation, companies have built a tried and proven method to overcome the rush in the holiday seasons. With some planning and action, you can also conquer the rush without exhausting yourself.

In this blog, we’ll talk about some strategies with which you can handle your customer service requests smoothly during the holiday season. And NO, you don’t have to suffer the burnout just because the volume has increased.

Leverage historical analytics to plan your actions

In simpler words, “learn from the past.” Go to your customer service management software, check out the data from the previous year’s volume in customer service requests. If you have an idea of what’s coming, you’ll be able to plan your goals accordingly

Update your help center articles

Help center articles are one of the best ways to decrease basic queries. Check out the frequently asked questions from the data you’ve pulled. Create help center articles for those issues and highlight them on your contact page.

Prepare your customer service playbook

The customer service playbook refers to the document from where your representatives can pull the responses and send them to your customers. You can brainstorm the most common issues with your team and prepare “one size fits all” responses. This way, your team will only have to make minor changes while responding to the customers saving them much time to address another query.

Use response automation bots

Artificial Intelligence has become really powerful these days. Using response bots will help you a lot in this situation. When you integrate the bot in your system, it will answer all the basic queries your customers have. The requests will pass on to your customer service team only if the query is beyond the capabilities of an AI bot.

Hire temporary employees

You can use FTH (Fixed term hire) strategy during this rush season. The employees will sign a fixed-term contract to work with you until the rush ends. With the help of technology, you can train that team in a short amount of time to handle your customers efficiently.

Did you know?

“Amazon adds around 120,000 temporary workers over November and December. They use technology such as mobile training touch screens and even robots to help teach new hires, which saves money and shortens training time to 2 days, according to an article in the WSJ.”

Use a remote workforce with outsourcing companies

Outsourcing companies can help you hire and train a new team really fast. The best part about this is that you will be spending lesser than what will it cost you to build a new in-house team.

It is not a piece of cake to make sure that everything goes smoothly during rush seasons, but it is not impossible as well. The key to overcome this is strategic planning and action. So, do the smart work and save yourself from burnout, and you can also have a holiday as merrier as it is.