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Holiday CX Best Practices During Seasonal Call Spikes

4 minute read, posted on 10/05/2021, by VXI Marketing

Seasonal Call Spikes

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving Sale, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve Sale remind us of one thing: the holidays are coming, and your business’s seasonal call spikes will soon be in full swing. While it is the time to be jolly for customers and businesses, ’tis the season to be busy and overstretched for the BPO industry.

Peak season signifies an increase in calls, longer queues, and around-the-clock service in addition to the usual call center volume. Businesses should develop a comprehensive strategy and advance preparation to keep up with the forthcoming traffic and avoid customer dissatisfaction. In fact, according to NBC 5’s survey, after one year into the pandemic, more than 75% of customers have less tolerance for customer service with unusually high call volume, uninformed agents, and unresolved issues. That is why it is vital for businesses to partner with experienced companies. For years, customer service outsourcing solution providers such as VXI, have been providing burst capacity agents who offer short-term but greater schedule flexibility, requiring no long-term contract and at a fraction of the cost compared to an in-house call center.

Getting additional agents for seasonal call spikes is just one step. There are several best practices listed below that should be part of your seasonal demand strategy to help you secure your functional day-to-day operations during peak season:

Embrace Chatbot and enhance Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

Improve your customer service experience by maximizing technology and equipping your social media channels with an automated response setup. Social messages received by retailers have been trending upwards since 2015, and it is always best to serve customers on a channel that is most accessible to them nowadays. It’s also vital to review automated phone answering service recordings and IVR to warrant a shorter waiting time and to streamline the process.

These easy-to-integrate tools can minimize the bulk and answer particular issues such as immediate concerns, basic customer queries, FAQs, and self-service solutions.

Have an accurate forecast and prediction

Conduct a thorough review of your historic data from 2018-2019. How was it different from 2020? Undoubtedly the difficulties, industry projections, and forecasts have evolved. Knowing how to measure the previous backlogs and formulating an efficient projection can help you develop a more effective plan.

Ensure sufficient staffing

With careful review and analysis of your company’s data and resources, you will be able to determine how to staff up your customer support right before the holidays begin. Track your staff’s productivity and effectiveness. Study how you can maximize their performances, talk to the leads, and listen to how you can supply enough staff. From there, you would know the right amount of gap to fill.

Encourage delivery of exceptional customer service

Through the help of business process outsourcing and its advanced technology, customer service performance can be easily monitored and analyzed. With the presence of Quality Analysts, Training Coaches, Subject Matter Experts, and speech analytic tools, common customer problems can be quickly identified which can help agents deliver exceptional customer service. Remember that the quality of our service is always better than quantity.

Provide detailed reference guides for staff use

Equipping agents with all the necessary information is a must. Additionally, it is also vital to keep everyone in the loop for important updates, promotions, and guidelines for this season. Conducting daily check-ins and sending your staff real-time information and references can make them 100% reliable to be of service.

The seasons are changing and now the world is slowly transitioning back into a safer space for commerce. People are regaining their old lives back, and with all the planning, hassle, and rush of the holiday season, partnering with an experienced call center outsourcing service provider that you can trust is a must.

VXI is ready to take on whatever the changing seasons throw at us. If you’d like to learn more about how you can ramp up your holiday season CX, while cutting out the unnecessary effort and money, let’s talk.

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