Managing Customer Service During Peak Season

Managing Customer Service During Peak Season

While the holiday season brings immense opportunities for businesses, it also brings a similar rise in challenges. For retailers, service providers, and a variety of other companies who experience peak demand during the holidays every year, managing customer service needs and demands can be a daunting task. From ensuring you have the appropriate staff to handle increased volume, to handling a wider variety of support requests than usual, business managers need to put serious thought into their customer service strategies well before the holidays start to roll around.

Peak seasons are important from a sales volume perspective, but the statistics show that good customer service during peak times can have real and measurable effects on the financial success of your business. For example, Bain and Company found that businesses can grow revenues between 4 and 8% simply by prioritizing better customer service experiences, and increasing your customer retention rate by just 5% can increase profits from 25-75%. Every business knows that customers are the key to success, but you may not have realized just how big of a key.

While different businesses have different unique customer service needs, there are some general tips and strategies that can help any business prepare itself for managing the customer service demands of the typical holiday season. With this in mind, here are four key tips to help your business stay on top of things, help your customers feel valued and heard, and also maximize your bottom line by minimizing returns and increasing your conversion rate.

Tip #1: Enlist call center outsourcing to help scale your support staff up to meet demand

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One challenge for many businesses, no matter the size, is maintaining an appropriate level of customer service staff through the peaks and troughs of your typical business cycle. While no one wants customers experiencing extended wait times or sub-par service, businesses can also find their budget quickly dwindling by holding on to too many customer service professionals during slower periods throughout the year.

This is where call center outsourcing can be a lifesaver. Professional call center services, like those offered by Canon ITS, can be scaled rapidly to meet increased (or decreased) periods of demand, letting you better stretch your resources and still meet the needs of your customers during the holiday peak. These trained professionals can serve as an extension of your business, representing your brand and seamlessly integrating with your existing services or product teams.

Tip #2: Consider a Self-Service Portal

Many companies have found that developing extensive help libraries and troves of FAQ articles that can be easily accessed by customers leads to better customer satisfaction and the ability to remove common support requests by providing helpful and easy answers for customers to find themselves. Often, businesses will create help “articles” that can be tagged with common keywords that customer service staff may be able to identify as common for similar types of requests.

Adding a sizable number of new employees solely dedicated to a customer service call center can easily overwhelm, or at least strain, your existing HR department. This not only drains budgeting that could be deployed elsewhere (such as developing new products and services), but also opens you up to gaps in oversight over employee conduct and compensation that could expose you to potential liabilities that you are better off avoiding.

Tip #3: Consult with customer service experts to bring industry best practices to bear for your business

One of the most common ways that small businesses become overwhelmed by customer service needs during the holiday season is trying to do everything in-house. While you certainly know your customers better than anyone, having a fresh pair of experienced eyes examine your processes and workflows around customer support is a good idea at any time of the year - but especially before the peak season begins.

This is why it’s a great idea to consider consulting with customer service experts like Canon ITS, who can not only provide specific customer support solutions, but can also help you better identify the needs of your customers using data-driven recommendations. Canon ITS can not only bring knowledgeable staff with years of experience handling the holiday rush to help your company, but also can lean on industry best practices honed from work with a variety of clients who have tackled the holiday season every year. While you are certainly in charge of how your brand is represented to your customers, having a helpful hand can better clarify and guide operational decisions that can help your customer service staff succeed when the holidays roll around.

Tip #4: Do a “triage” meeting to understand previous challenges before choosing any of the other options

One of the hardest things for business owners and managers to do is taking a hard look at where things went wrong in the past. Often, keeping an optimistic look toward the future is important for employee morale, and no one wants to dwell on mistakes too much. However, if your last holiday season was challenging from a customer support perspective, one of the best things you can do is consider holding a “triage” meeting.

Gather your leading and most experienced customer service staff and managers together, and allow everyone to reflect and speak frankly on the challenges in the past. Was it staffing issues? An inability to process requests efficiently? An inability to get the answers customers need in a timely manner? Issues with the customer service portal itself? By spending some time and allowing everyone to contribute their experience and expertise, you can better understand your unique customer support challenges well before the peak season begins, and thus better identify which solutions would be most useful for your company to adopt this year.

Learn more about taking the pressure of your team during the holiday/peak season by connecting Canon ITS today.