Holiday and Weekend Support for Business – Holidays can be transformed into one of the highest revenue-generating periods of a year if planned and executed successfully. Planning should be a year-round event. Businesses should focus on delivering personalized experiences to individuals on the holidays they care about. Irrespective of the size or domain, all businesses come across a number of challenges and opportunities during a busy holiday season. Spikes in demand for customer service during holiday seasons and on weekends can burden your staff and systems. Customer support solutions in Australia are always ahead in after-hours and holiday support. They plan and prepare the right strategy, and deliver responsive support to help you overcome this and to set your business apart from that of competitors’.

A sudden influx of customer communications during holidays can compromise the quality of service. Bad news travels faster than good ones. A bad customer service experience will reach more ears than praise for a good service experience. Accessibility and convenience are other major factors that will title the scales in your favour.

Previous Year’s Data Can Help You A Lot

Take time to analyze last year data and check what your volume was like during the last holiday period. There might also be a change in the channel customers choose to contact you this year. Identify the channel that was most popular among customers during the last holiday season. You can focus on the same and turn off the rest to reduce the number of customer service representatives further. For instance, if most of the customers prefer emails more during the holiday season you may turn off or focus less on live chat and calls. Seek help from your marketing department and get a forecast of holiday rush sales or marketing campaigns.

Maintain An Informative Knowledgebase 

Go through the most common customer queries and pain points received during the last holiday season. You can use this data to update your knowledge base and saved replies. It also gives you an opportunity to improve internal processes and customer-facing rules such as hours, shipping policies, etc. Customer support solutions in Australia maintains an updated and informative knowledge base to allow self-service. Self-service is a win-win for both the customers and support staff. It empowers customers to solve the issue or get an answer to their question on their own. It also reduces the overload on the customer support staff. Customer support solutions in Australia offer quality self-service options. It will let you address a higher number of customers, potentially increasing your holiday sales.

Identify The Channel

As stated above analysing last year data will help you identify the channel to focus on during the holiday season. You should also consider current trends.  Start with channels that are most popular among your customers. You should set up processes and experiment with new tools long before the holiday traffic begins. Stepping into a new channel just before the holiday rush is risky. It is better to test it out during the less busy times of the year. After selecting the prefered channels assign each one a dedicated owner. Ownership ensures consistency of service, reduces inefficiencies and confusions. It assures that not even a single email or call goes unattended. You will have an account of who is staffing chat, and during which hours. Also, let your customers know exactly where they can find you. Customer support solutions in Australia offer support through the most popular customer communication channels. They won’t let you miss out even a single customer during the holiday rush. 

Automate

Implement automation wherever possible. Use automation to enrich customer experience rather than replacing human to human interaction. Customers will always love to interact with a human customer service representative. Hence, use automation to lessen their workload and streamline workflow. Employ automation to track best selling products or those with complicated shipping requirements during the holiday season. Customer support solutions in Australia use automation to route customer queries or issues to the right customer service representatives. It avoids re-routing. Automated systems eliminate the need for customers to repeat their issue multiple times to multiple agents. Thus, automation helps in serving more customers even during holiday rush with minimal customer support staff.

Outsource Or Hire Remote Workers

Outsourcing or hiring remote seasonal customer support staff will help you manage holiday and weekend volume more efficiently and effortlessly. A large candidate pool gives you greater access to the best people. Hiring people in multiple time zones will allow you to extend service to much a wider area. Outsourcing all or part of your customer service to customer support solutions in Australia allows you to scale up or down as needed. It eliminates the need for hiring extra during peak seasons. Outsourcing will help you manage fluctuating support loads during the holiday season. Effective customer support is the ability to go beyond just answering customer queries. You need to be proactive, empathetic and friendly in customer service which can be easily achieved through outsourcing.

Care About Your Staff

Customer support staff play an important role in optimizing a company’s holiday sales. They can potentially acquire new loyal followers with the exemplary customer service they provide. So, it is important to appreciate the staff working on the holiday season. Allow employees to take advantage of work from home once in a while or as per the company policy and convenience. Let them support customers from the comfort of their homes during the holiday season. You can offer additional day-offs during less busy days. You can have a holiday rotation schedule to ensure that overtime days are evenly divided among the team. Break up days into smaller chunks to let your employees spend time with their family during the holiday season.

You should plan ahead and be strategic to ensure a less hectic holiday season for your team. Weekend support need not be affected or be costly. Customer support solutions in Australia will help you achieve this and offer a better experience for your customers. You will be available and accessible to your customers with 24/7/365 support that’s easy on your pocket. Customer service during the holidays or weekends doesn’t have to be scary. Focus more on building the right engagement points, right revenue opportunities, and the right experiences, with the right kind of support.