Christmas and Holiday season are one of the biggest shopping seasons worldwide. Entrepreneurs and companies ensure they boost sales during the festive spirit by offering deals that excite and entice their customers. Holiday Customer support service has to be tailor-made for this purpose. Deals and offers on Christmas and Holiday season means you can expect unusual spikes in sales, pre-sales queries and customer support requests more than usual.
And as we said in our earlier post, Just as other industries, online retail needs a flexible and scalable help desk software to manage the support spikes. Similarly, for an IT or tech company, it becomes essential to work on holiday customer support from anywhere and everywhere – on the clock. With Desky’s Android and iOS Mobile App, you can always have a check on your customer support during these Christmas Holiday season rush. Thus, holiday customer support marketing is crucial for a successful year. In this post, we’ll share 8 tips for preparing your online website for the festive season.
8 Tips To Wonderfully Manage Christmas Customer Support Spike
- Prepare your team: As a front customer support agent, your team should be able to answer basic cases and pick up an article from the knowledgebase/resources if your technical staff is completely offline. Just how Desky lets you build a comprehensive set of articles and knowledgebase, you can add some insights and troubleshooting tips for your customers who come to you looking for holiday customer support.
2. Check FAQ list: To avoid holiday customer support swapping by your potential customers, you need to check all the relevant FAQ lists. Add FAQ on return and exchange, refunds, validity and so on. With Desky you can create as many as FAQs you think would be a value addition for your customers. Review your FAQs and map your customer journey by redirecting them to articles that are relevant.
3. Use of automation: Use automations to pull all new customer requests into a series of ticket numbers so that you can easily manage them. The Holiday customer support needs extra attention because you do not want to drive your customer grumpy or mad due to lack of attention. Ticket assigning automation of Desky allows you to save that time while your customer support is offline.
4. Be transparent: As a company and an entrepreneur, it is extremely essential that you know who from your customer support team is addressing which product/category customers, Holiday customer support can be simplified when your help desk software is transparent enough to let you see and manage your customer support agents. On the other side, for customers and the support agent, it should be conveyed in the best way that it will take time rather than hanging up on your customer for an infinite time.
Holiday Season Customer Support Rush Guide
5. Multiple communication mediums to be unified: Customers now use multiple channels to reach you before, after and during the purchase process. In the light of this behavior, it is vitally important for a company to have all angles covered over the holiday season sale spikes. If you plan to offer real-time support on Live Chat software, then let your customers know that. Define their holiday customer support journey/process.
6. Rotate holiday customer support teamIt becomes extremely stressful for your customer support team to be on decks during Christmas and Holiday season rush. With a flexible help desk software like Desky, you can onboard and change your customer support agents in literally a few steps. It’s important that your tech team and the front customer support agent gets a time-off so that they can strike the balance and keep the boat floating.
7. Turn on alerts: Keep email notifications on so that you can update your customers while your customer support agent is away for a while. Always keep knowledgebase links handy so that you can route your customers to appropriate articles.
8. Small company and holiday customer support management: If you’re a startup and extremely small company (say for instance, your support team technically means just one person replying to the messages and resolving the requests), it’s essential not to impose unrealistic deadlines. Do not rush by proclaiming a 24 hours promise of resolving queries, instead help your customer support agent to save time in canned responses – i.e. you can save some drafted messages which are repetitive in nature. Desky offers this brilliant ‘Saved Replies’ feature to make it convenient for agents.
Holiday Customer Support Checklist:
When you are getting ready for the holiday sales, you should ensure certain points are checked thoroughly. You will find more traffic on your online store with lots of customers browsing and buying products.
Below is the checklist of what can be done to avoid support mishaps:-
- Online store performance and speed of loading a single page: Test the checkout page and shopping cart.
- Create a special landing page in the Christmas and Holiday season theme.
- Place pop-up form.
- Check your promo codes and use the Call-to-action button to redirect.
- Set up discounts from the admin panel at your store.
5 Quick Tips to Respond Negative Feedback During Holiday Season
1. Personalize: Instead of writing Hi There, personalize your response by mentioning your customer’s name in the response. This will help your customer identify with you and your brand and make them feel that they are on the same page.
2. Positive tone: Your customers expect a helpful solution and if there is nothing you can do about it, always hold the positive tone and offer something that might help your customer at some point.
3. Apologize: If your holiday customer support team got swamped away due to a lot of support queries, you should apologize. It is okay to start a response with a sincere apology.
4. Combat negative reviews: Having a flawless holiday customer support experience for each and everyone certainly look way too much for many of us, but have your combat strategy ready when you get a negative review. You can ask other happy customers to share their experience so that the negative review can impact less and there are chances that your potential customer might overlook those negative feedback.
5. NO negative response: Strictly avoid in a verbal fight with your customer. We do not want our credibility to go down as a brand. Never indulge or encourage negative responses from your customer support team for your customers.
Conclusion
When your customer support team is armed with the right information and the right help desk software in advance, you can manage your customer service even on the holiday sales spikes. Desky offers you a data-driven approach so that you can manage your customer support resources in the best way possible. An adaptable customer support help desk software can help create a positive customer experience. So take points in account this festive season to uplift your support team’s spirit and manage the Christmas and holiday season sales rush effectively.You can improve your holiday customer support with Desky’s Freelancer and Business plan. Level up your customer service today!
