Support teams in every industry are impacted
by seasonal variation, whether it’s the holidays, product releases, or special
events. This holiday season, experts are forecasting a growth in sales of
4-4.5% over 2017, with online sales increasing up to 21%.
Spikes in demand for customer service can test
your staff and your systems, but planning and preparation can help you come out
the other side stronger than ever.
Structural changes
Impact: High
Level of difficulty: High
Creating a business that can better handle
shifting workloads takes more up-front work, but it can generate ongoing
benefits in efficiency, employee happiness, and financial savings.
1. Update your onboarding
playbook
Ramp
up new and temporary hires faster with a documented onboarding process you’ve
tested and improved throughout the year. This will make it easier on the rest
of the team, in addition to new staff.
McDonald’s
simplifies training process
McDonald's often has new or potential managers
work at a McDonald's location inside of a department store, rest stop, or other
partnering business. These locations often tend to have fewer moving parts than
stand-alone restaurants.
Amazon
uses tech to prepare orders in advance
Amazon adds around 120,000 temporary workers
to their U.S. business over November and December. They use technology such as
mobile training touch screens and even robots to help teach new hires, which
saves money and shortens training time to 2 days, according to an article in
the WSJ.
What can you do?
Invest in updating and expanding training
materials.
Simplify and improve internal systems, giving
staff easier access to the information they need to help the customer.
Give the authority to the frontlines: Reduce
delays waiting for permission or transferring between people.
2. Modernize your hiring
process
Look for people who have the flexibility and
skills to ramp up quickly. For example, Help Scout customer Revolution Food
Network, a healthy food community, found that actors were perfect
for event support roles, because they love flexible, temporary work involving
communicating with customers.
3. Work with outsourced
resources
Outsourced support doesn’t have to mean super
cheap, script-driven call centers. Today there are companies that function as
remote partners, flexible extensions of your own team. You can benefit from
their vast experience in flexibly scaling up and down. With a relatively small
investment from your support team, you can shape them to your company’s
standards and style.
4. Automate like a human
Adjust your auto-reply message. Update your message for the holiday season to
set expectations and include links to the most common issues.
Update your contact page. Address common questions and link to
self-help resources so customers can get answers quickly, without needing to
contact you. Learn more.
Simplify your offering. Surprise and delight is a great strategy on
an idle Tuesday, but during the holiday rush, some customers need resolution
and answers — fast. Give your support team permission to not offer some of
those ‘little extras’ during a rush.
Use historical data. Plan your staffing schedule according to
historical data, and don’t leave it to the last second! Give your team notice
about any holiday staffing requirements (or constraints).
Synchronize across the company. Big marketing promotions can drive major
support traffic, and IT maintenance operations can be disruptive. Work closely
with your colleagues to plan around busy periods.
Update your support documentation. A comprehensive, intuitive, easy-to-navigate knowledge
base is a massive time saver and resource for both customers and
your team. See our knowledge base playlist for practical tips.
Prepare responses. Review last year’s customer conversations and
frequently visited knowledge base articles for common rush time scenarios
(delayed responses, shipping issues, etc.), and pre-write answers. Learn more.
Preparing for the rush
Impact: High
Level of difficulty: Medium
Even if you don’t have time for structural
changes right now, there are a ton of things you can do to prepare
yourself and your staff for rush times.
Use workflows and
filters to tag or split out basic questions that non-support team members can
help with.
Assign a triage expert
to oversee operations, identify new issues, sort conversations to the right
place, ask for help as needed, and spot conversations that don’t need immediate
answers.
Record what you learn.
Though it may seem like one more task, taking time to record learnings
during the holiday rush is an investment in your whole team’s future, saving
them time and headaches next year. For example, take note of things you tried
that didn’t end up being necessary, systems that slowed you down, and
documentation that was missing or needs updating.
Keep systems stable.
The holidays are not the time for a big development release or live testing, so
collaborate with product and engineering teams ahead of the rush to ensure
their schedule won’t create unexpected work.
Adjust your goals. Busy
times call for scaled-back measures, so you may need to reconsider how you
prioritize your team’s workload, and your target response times may need to
change.
Proactively communicate
with customers. Let them know if your response times are going to be
significantly longer than normal. Setting accurate expectations helps inspire
patience and understanding from your customers.
Care for your team!
Make sure they take breaks — burnout is a real risk. Consider offering
incentives to fill added support hours and recognize your team’s performance.
Increase your social
monitoring. People can move to social channels to complain if their
expectations aren’t being met, and being responsive there can head off larger
issues.
Regardless of your budget or resources, you
can prepare more effectively for the holiday rush. If you haven’t invested in
training and planning, adding new staff or tools during a busy period can be
counterproductive.
Simplification, documentation, organization,
and preparation — those are the most impactful tools during busy times. Start
now, and revisit this list after your next busy period. Your team, and your
customers, will thank you for it.
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