Customer Service is all about holiday spirit

Holiday Season is around the corner and from a customer's perspective it is all about discounts, huge sales and shopping whether it is done by going to the physical stores or it is done online. But have you ever wondered what actually goes behind the scenes? What makes that discount work for you? Or the people who are there to help you in the store or assist you in making the purchase online and making sure that it is delivered on time for the Christmas dinner or you get to wear your favorite dress on the new year's party. Well, they are the ones who makes the clock tick in the right direction to make sure that everything works according to plan and everyone gets what they are looking for. You are one customer who visits them physically or online but there are thousands of other customers who visit them daily during this season and they are dealt with the same respect and courteous behavior as you have dealt with. As holiday season is important for every outlet and retailer it builds pressure and demands endless working hours from the staff who is working in the stores or sitting behind a desk to help assist online customers.

In order to make sure that everything goes according to plan and every customer is happy, you will need to consider some of the pointers mentioned below to develop and deploy your own plan to tackle the situation.

~        Prepared To Be Crushed

~        Learn To Prioritize

~        Be Human - Not A Robot

~        Unity Is Strength

Prepared to Be Crushed

Holiday season may seem nice but in actual it is the biggest shopping spree of the whole year. On an average sales and customer interactions increase between 70%-80% as compared to usual sales or customer footprint which you may see during the normal days. This can easily push any support and sales agents to their limits in handling pressure. So, you should be well prepared to handle this kind of pressure, my advice; keep a coffee mug handy which will help you stay on your toes and not get collapsed or rather crushed by this enormous pressure specially if you are working in live chat support, you will be swarmed with chats during peak hours.

What managers can do to help their team members is to introduce some extra benefits for staff members who perform exceptionally well under these circumstances, if you are from the sales team then a bonus would work or if you are from the customer support department then achieving the maximum score in quality and KPI's should entitle your staff for some monetary reward or appreciation.

Learn To Prioritize

In order to perform wonders during holiday seasons you should know what to do and when to do. You should be able to identity between situation to prioritize them from being RED TAPE IMPORTANT to usual activity. This will help you finish you tasks within time while ensuring the maximum and most promising results which are required. In order to prioritize the customers you need to have some knowledge about your customer's behavior and the application which you are using to handling these customers. If you are providing 24/7 live chat support for your customers then your live chat agents should be able to prioritize the customers based upon the customer wait time, issue faced by the customer, time required to resolve the issue and the severity of the situation for the customer. Once they have identified all these factors they should be able to prioritize your customers and their issues. Which should enable you to resolve the issues and handle customers and delegate the task to another department if required.

Be Human - Not A Robot

Working under pressure sometimes pushes the agents to use too many canned responses in order to save time and effort. But that may lead to a robotic response instead of giving a human impression. Using canned responses is good but using too many of them is bad, since the moment you start giving the feel of a robot you have lost it with the customer. In order to have a meaningful conversation with the customer you need to have the human touch otherwise he/she might mistake you for being an automated response machine and you will miss out the important information which will  be vital to resolving the issue and making sure the customer does not come back with the same issue in more aggravated state since that will hinder your progress.

Unity Is Strength

Team work is important for success in any course of life; In order to achieve excellence in the bone crushing pressure of holiday season you need to understand the importance of team work. Some of you might think that they work well when they are alone but in order to be successful in the longer run you need to know how to work along with other people. In order to achieve your goals during the holiday season team work helps when long office hours are required, or when you need to delegate a task to someone who is best suited for it. This will not only help you assist your customers in the best possible way but it will also help you to be on top of your game as you will not be alone to take all the pressure. Live chat agents are known to handle a good amount of work pressure, but that is only possible when they are in perfect coordination with other departments. So, make sure that your team members know how to work in synchronization with each other as that will help them achieve the optimum results with less amount of effort.

Right now since the holiday season is about to start it is about time to come up with your strategies and plans to handle more customers in the best possible way as it will help you grow business and profits.

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