How to Handle Holiday Time Customer Service on Christmas Rush

Christmas is here! 

And, your biggest holiday period begins. Businesses are jumping with their marketing strategies, budgets, and products to catch as many customers as possible.

Most customers treat this Christmas deal season as the best purchase time. So, they come online during this Christmas rush and scoop the best deals. This goes the same for retailers too.

The Christmas rush has always been an exciting period to attract new customers to your brand with crazy deals and discounts.

And, with this spike in demand, the ticket volume in your customer support also spikes up. More deals bring more pre-sale support questions, more sales mean more after-sales customer support queries.

But, you can tackle this rush with a pre-planned holiday time customer service strategy. In this blog, you’ll learn how to manage the crazy customer expectations during Christmas and provide an excellent customer experience.

3 tips to handle holiday time customer service

Deal seasons like BFCM, Halloween, or Christmas are the peak selling seasons for small businesses. With proper planning and strategy, a small business can achieve tremendous sales goals at this time.

Here are 3 ways you should get prepared for the Christmas rush as a small business owner:

1. Prepare for the worst

Start planning before the Christmas seasons start. Plan for customer service early as you plan your marketing, content, or other things.

Customers will expect fast customer support available 24/7 online this season. Think how you can top that. Do you have the manpower? Remember, in this holiday season, everyone deserves family time. You can’t make your agents work on a holiday 24/7! 

You can offer high pay for those willing to do the work without pressure to do the job. Consider outsourcing customer support to cover the workload. Always plan according to your budget and operational capabilities.

Look into your data and analyze which customer service channels you get the most customer queries. Assign multiple agents on the most received ones to handle queries during rush hours. Virtual assistants could be more helpful when you have a sophisticated customer support system.

Engage with your current customer base with emails and content copy. Email them any changes before starting the Christmas deals. Managing customer expectations is one part of the pre-plans. You don’t want customers to expect something you are not offering. This will create a huge unnecessary spike in customer support tickets about something you are not selling and waste the agent’s time.

2. Consider automation

Add automation to your planning strategy for the holiday time deals. Automation workflows will save you tons of money, time, and resources. Learn how to automate services like Zapier to integrate them with your service channels and reply to your customers quickly.

Choose a good helpdesk with amazing automation features. An automated helpdesk must have these functionalities:

• Help you to assign agents automatically on tickets.
• You can choose where to assign agents and which products based on tags
• You can choose keywords and trigger automation based on it
• You can send pre-written replies based on customer queries 
• You can point customers to knowledgebase when customer type any question on support forms
• You can use outgoing webhooks to run automation as you like

The possibility of doing more with automation is unimaginable. Automation can reduce your agents’ workloads, and they can attend to more customers quickly. This helps to reduce customer queries and runs your customer support system efficiently.

3. Train your people

The third and final tip is to train your people for all events. Your agents will have to interact with various types of customers daily. Some will be kind and understandable, but some will be rude. How they manage these customer interactions depends on their training and their capabilities.

A good customer support agent knows how to manage customer conversations and turn it into a great customer experience. That’s why training is an essential investment as a business owner you should highly consider.

Empower your agents to take action quickly, and do whatever it takes to resolve customers’ problems. Do not force company policy on customers if customer preference is reasonable. Train your agents to know when to bend the rules and take appropriate actions.

Invest in an efficient helpdesk that will give agents customer data whenever needed. Create an internal knowledge wiki for VAs to learn and educate. Assure your agents to ask for help when they need your assistance.

Optimize your self-service and integrate it with your helpdesk via automation. For example, with Fluent Support workflow automation, you can handle repetitive and time-consuming tasks at a glance. So, you can reduce future customer ticket volume drastically.

Conclusion

You can optimize customer support for holiday time rushes by putting these plans in place before the season begins. Also, make sure you invest in reliable helpdesk software when building your customer support operation. Self-service should be available even before customers search for it.

Watch trends and use data to identify spikes in customer rushes. Get ready when customers arrive. Small businesses can achieve greater sales with an empowered customer support team by not compromising on quality and providing a great customer experience during a busy Christmas season.