10 Tips To Manage Customers This Festive Season 🎄🎅🏻

Black Friday is nearly upon us which kicks off the holiday spending season. This year, US holiday sales are expected to reach $1.3 trillion 😲.

This busy sales period acts as a great opportunity for your business to win new customers & upsell to your existing customers.

On the flip side, the holiday period could pose as a huge risk to your business if you are unable to effectively manage the large spike in customer support requests that your team will inevitably receive over this period.

Providing a great customer experience across the busy holiday period will be a major differentiator between brands. Companies who provide a superb customer experience will attract new customers and increase the lifetime value of existing ones. On the flip side, companies who neglect customer experience (by not having relevant support frameworks in place) will be left scratching their heads when customers start to leave to competitors.

In the below article, we provide 10 recommendations on how you can ensure your frontline teams are prepared for the huge surge of customer support requests that come with the Holiday season.

10 Ways To Better Manage Customer Support Requests This Festive Season 🎄🎅🏻

Throughout the holiday season, there's money to be made and customers to be saved. Feel free to use the 10 tips below as a "holiday readiness" checklist to ensure your contact centre support team are prepared for the next few months.

#1 - Keep An Eye On Important KPIs

While it is important to keep your finger on the pulse of customer feedback all year round, there are three customer metrics that we strongly recommend you keep a closer eye on in the next 1-2 months:

1. Customer Effort Score (CES) - understand the amount of effort involved by the customer in achieving their goals. This can generally be achieved by getting customers to agree or disagree with a statement like "[Company] made it easy for me to achieve XX outcome."

2. Transactional NPS - understand the level of advocacy that the customer has for your business after the support interaction. This can be achieved by asking an NPS question at the end of a support request: "How likely would you be to recommend [Company] to your family & friends?"

3. Resolution Rates - understand the speed and effort involved in resolving customers' requests. There are several ways that resolution can be measured; however, we recommend that you try to leverage an internal metric (First Response Time) and a customer metric (First Contact Resolution).

#2 - Assess Your Refund & Return Policy

The Holiday period is a great opportunity to wow your customers, both in a negative or a positive way. Whilst we understand that refunds & returns can be a large expense to your business, short term pain could lead to long term gain.

For example, Bombas have a ‘Happiness Guarantee’ where they claim to do “whatever it takes” to make the customer happy. They have measured the impact of this guarantee, finding that any customer who interacts with the Happiness Team has increased their LTV with the company by 200%!

Wherever possible, empower your support team to provide the best outcomes for the customer, even if that means arranging a refund for scenarios that might not always warrant it. The positive word of mouth associated with a great customer experience will likely outweigh the associated costs of refunds & returns.

#3 - Explore Omni-Channel Support Options

We want you to imagine yourself as a customer for a second. You’ve just received a new coffee machine as a present and can’t wait to make your first coffee. BUT it’s not turning on!!

You attempt to read the instructions, yet they don’t make sense. What’s the next thing you’re going to do? Figure out where you can get the support you need.

This is a critical moment of truth for the relationship between the customer and your business. A poor support experience will likely lead to an aggravated customer and no return business.

Many businesses try to hide their customer support contact information as they view their support center as a cost to the company. We’re recommending that you take the opposite approach; figure out how you can make support options as accessible as possible for your customers! This will differentiate your business from competitors and will ensure you retain your customers for longer.

We know that customers are increasingly turning to social messaging apps when they connect with companies. Enquiries over WhatsApp, FB Messenger, WeChat and LINE increased by 36% last year. This increase was higher than any other channel.

As such, we strongly recommend you consider adding additional below support options to your business before the holiday season commences.

#4 - Establish A Triage Process For Customer Complaints

Inevitably, there are going to be customers who become frustrated with your business through the holiday season. These customers are not always right but are generally the loudest and pose the biggest risk to your brand's reputation.

For that reason, it is extremely important to establish a complaints triage process. We recommend using an approach referred to as “CRAM”:

• CAPTURE; quickly identify customer complaints. This could be done by leveraging technology, i.e., text analytics, or by creating a tiered categorization system within your CRM (e.g., requests, issues, complaints).

• REPORT; create dashboards and/or spreadsheets that give management visibility of the number of complaints (open/closed), complaint reasons, and time to resolve.

• ACT; establish transparent processes for complaint resolution, including expected SLAs and required escalation steps. Where possible, use technology to alert different team members when they need to resolve a complaint.

• MEASURE; leverage aggregated data to diagnose systemic issues and iterate processes to mitigate the risk of future complaints. Implement a “test, iterate & learn” mentality.

#5 - Implement Self Service Solutions

Today, 67% of customers prefer self-service over speaking to a company representative. If you want to scale your support during this holiday season, you must empower your customers to resolve their issues on their own with self-service solutions.

To ensure you’re giving customers quick answers to their questions (whilst also deflecting the support request away from your support team), make sure you have an up-to-date repository of self-service articles / FAQs.

A word of warning though. According to a recent Zendesk report, 51% of customers reported that they did not get an accurate answer when speaking to a Chatbot. For this reason, it is integral that there is a clear, frictionless path to human support when the customer cannot get the answer that they need.

When done right, self-service can make the customer happier whilst also saving costs for your business. When done incorrectly, self-service can be extremely time consuming and frustrating. We strongly suggest that you continuously test out your self-service solutions to ensure that they're achieving the right outcomes for customers!

#6 - Explore Ways To Be Proactive With Your Support

Imagine a world where the customer support team proactively reached out to the customers 😱.

In today's digital world, this is definitely achievable if your business is able to leverage data in the right way. For example, if the customer is expecting an online delivery from your business but you know that this delivery is going to be late, a courtesy message to inform the customer would mitigate the need for that customer to have to speak with your support team.

Similarly, if your hardware support team is able to detect anomalies with the performance of a certain product, a simple phone call or email to troubleshoot the issue will prevent the customer from having to take time out of their day to call your team.

While providing proactive customer care in a busy holiday period may sound counterintuitive, we can guarantee you that it will lead to more customers self-serving their issues, leading to fewer inbound contacts to your support teams. Now that's what we call a great customer experience!

#7 - Assess Your Operating Hours

There will be many people out there who claim that 24/7 Support across the holiday period is an absolute necessity. We don’t agree with this blanket approach, as it can be unnecessarily time consuming and costly to your business.

Our recommendation would be to leverage data to inform your strategy around support operating hours. You know your customers better than anyone else and we bet that you have data which provides insight into the popular hours & locations that demand customer support.

Try to leverage data from previous holiday periods to inform your operating hour strategy across the holiday period. Leverage chat-bots and self-service strategies to provide some level of assistance 24/7, but allocate your physical resources to the most important hours of the day!

#8 - Review Training Materials & System Access

When customer support volumes become unbearably high during the holiday influx of tickets, it is increasingly important to ensure that customer overflow can be managed.

To do this, companies should invest in support systems and processes that can streamline the management of their knowledge base across many product lines, reducing the overhead impact on support teams down the line.

Ask yourself this question: if support requests increased by 200% overnight, do you have the appropriate materials (and technology access) prepared to allow any employee within your business to manage these requests?

#9 - Automate Repetitive Tasks

Automating repetitive tasks is more critical than ever with the increased influx of support tickets over the holiday season.

While automation frees up time for your support teams to work on more complex tasks, you should be mindful that not all automation will solve customer requests. This is why we recommend you be strategic with the method in which you automate repetitive tasks.

Chatbots may be able to assist in solving extremely basic problems, but they still tend to fall short of more complex troubleshooting. As such, we recommend that you explore more advanced automation solutions with an added layer of intelligence compared to a traditional chatbot.

With any piece of automation, it is crucial to measure, test & iterate the performance of automation to ensure that it is actually solving problems for your customers. When done correctly, automation will give support agents as much time as possible to focus on more complex customer issues; however, if done incorrectly, it will create more frustration & effort for your customers & support teams.

#10 - Keep Response Times Low

Customers are time-poor during the holiday period, which means they expect their questions to be answered or mistakes fixed immediately.

Providing a great customer experience is going to be a key differentiating factor for businesses that win and lose customers throughout the holiday season. This battle begins with the response times that you provide to your customers.

The First Response Time (FRT) should be a headline metric that your business monitors as frequently as possible. Every business is different, but you should acknowledge each request within one hour of receiving the request and then provide daily or bi-daily updates on progress.

Please remember that your job is not complete after the initial response to the customer. Try to regularly provide status updates on progress once a request was submitted. Trust us when we say that very few customers will complain about over-communication; they generally appreciate the transparency! Remember - a slow response time (and poor updates throughout the support process) may be the difference between keeping or losing a customer!

Graph of the Week 📈

According to the CMO Council, Fast Response Times are the biggest drivers of a great customer experience;