Sleigh, what?! It’s here already?! We’ve reached December, many businesses’ busiest time of year. Customer service around Christmas is notoriously bad and with the added strains COVID-19 is putting on customer service teams it’s important that you’re prepared for the festive rush.
Following these top-tips can help you avoid a nightmare before Christmas:
With demand set to be high, make sure you can cope with a high number of orders and deliveries. Outline clear last order dates, but give customers confidence their gift will arrive in time for Christmas day. Being able to deliver during the festive period and not let customers down is imperative – customers don’t forget…especially at Christmas.
Make sure your enquiry forms, phone numbers and email addresses are all up-to-date. Customers need to be able to get hold of you when they need to and providing wrong business information sets you off on the wrong foot. If a customer tries to call or email then they expect to get through the first time, every time.
Although customers understand that Christmas is a busy time of year for everyone, it’s better to have a customer delighted that their order has arrived earlier than expected, than for the customer to be frustrated at a late delivery. Ensure your customer service representatives are being honest rather than over-promising and under-delivering.
Missing calls from customers seeking information can impact your businesses ability to deliver excellent customer service. This, along with the risk of missing potential new business enquiries, at a time where customer service and new business revenue is so important could be critical for some businesses.
Ask questions to clarify situations, take notes and log information to ensure continuity of customer care. Your team should treat every call uniquely, hear the customers specific issues and find swift solutions.
Having the correct processes in place will help things run smoothly and helps to make sure that issues don’t occur. You may be running reduced staff, or trying to work from home, so having an outlined process in place that ensures calls get put through to the right people will help efficiency during peaks in enquiries. You’ll also benefit from reviewing procedures – you may have brought some temporary staff in during the festive period, so ensuring procedures are up to date so they can hit the ground running and are working in the same way as everyone else is important.
Not enough staff so calls aren’t getting answered on time? Running reduced staff and finding it difficult to manage your customer service enquiries? It’s more important than ever to ensure SLAs are being met and customers are satisfied. Keep hold-times low and ensure calls get through to the right people every time. Solid8 provide outsourced customer service in Basingstoke, across Hampshire and the rest of the UK. We can provide a short-term solution over the festive period to ensure that there’s snow-way a customer will feel unloved. To discuss your requirements please reach out to the team on 01256 597 888.
