Customer service during holidays

Imagine we are towards the end of November - Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just over. While your team did all the hard work to manage the increase in customer interaction volume, they are now faced with the sustained flow of support requests in December.

It is a time when several members of your support might choose to go on a vacation. So, you need a scalable way of managing support requests during the holiday season. You need to plan your holiday season and yet allow some flexibility to ensure both your team and customers have a seamless experience.

customer support during holidays

Maximize your self-service

Given that you expect lesser number of support agents to be available to support your customers, maximize your self-service portals. Make sure the knowledge base, FAQs, product videos, and all the supporting content are upto date. More importantly, make it easy for your customers to access the self-service options. This means, you need to list down several sources through which your customer can get in touch with you and make sure that your customers can access self-service from all those sources.

Some of these sources can be:

Once you set the expectations with your customer for the holiday season, your customers are likely to appreciate it.

Use live chat tools and bots effectively

You can manage the workload of your existing customer support workforce by effectively using live chat tools and chatbots. Live chat tools help your customers to instantly converse with your support team and resolve issues. In fact, modern chat tools help you balance the conversation load by distributing it meaningfully based on the availability of your support agents (agents who are logged in) on a given day.

You can use chatbots to support customers across time zones and in a proactive manner. For example, if you are using a live chat tool like Freshdesk Messaging, you can trigger campaigns where your chatbot can contextually and proactively start a conversation with your customer based on the page of your website or support portal your customer is in. In fact, chatbots can handle the primary conversations with your customer and then assign it to the right support agent automatically by matching the expertise of your support agent and the customer’s request.

 

Engage new customers with videos

 An important part of proactive customer support is engagement. Once you have set up chat support, bots, and self-service - you need to make it easy for your new customers to find what they are looking for. It is observed that in the holiday season, businesses see a surge in the number of support requests from new customers compared to the existing ones. For example, it makes great sense to greet them with a video highlighting how to make the best use of your self-service than them having to navigate through your website and figure out. More importantly, including a video increases the engagement by 4x.
 

Next topic - Building your multi-channel customer support

What next?

The value of self-service in the digital age

Self-service customer support is a type of customer support where the agent needn’t assist the customer, and let the customer access the solution at the click of a button. Forrester reports suggest that 91% of customers prefer using a self-service portal if it meets their needs.

Read more

value of self-service