Is your Contact Center Prepared for the Holiday Rush?
When you think about the holidays your first thought probably includes lots of parties, brisker temperatures, and cherished time with friends and family. Customer service folks across any industry might think of long lines and wait times, less than cheerful customers, and feelings of frustration. The last thing you want to do is get in the way of your customer’s ability to have a happy holiday. Preparing early can be the difference between a naughty or nice NPS score.
It takes the right measure of customer data, careful planning, and technology to get the recipe for perfect customer service right during the holidays. Putting the work in now will guarantee your contact center is set up for success when the sleigh bells start ringing.
Use these four tactics to get ahead of the reindeer games and prepare your contact contact for the holiday rush.
Understand Your Customer’s Pain Points
There are two primary ways to identify customer pain points
- Speaking with your customers.
- Speaking with customer service agents and representatives.
Are your customers waiting on hold for inordinate periods of time before they reach an agent and get a resolution? Are agents feeling overwhelmed and disempowered? Both of these issues stem from the same problem: a lack of unity.
Read our blog on breaking down internal silos.
In preparation for the holidays, it’s beneficial to ramp up other channels that offer asynchronous interaction. Doing so will allow your customers to engage on their channel of choice and find answers faster. You’ll also be collecting a wellspring of data that can better inform agents in the future. Evolve your agent workforce with customer insight and provide them the capabilities needed to quickly identify and service customers across all channels.
Empower Your Agents to Best Serve Customers
With that said, there’s a strong correlation between customer satisfaction and employee engagement. If you want to provide the best caliber of service possible you need to trust your employees. Make them feel empowered to assist customers. Allow agents to take control of customer interactions and make decisions. This is especially crucial during the holiday seasons when contact centers experience higher call volume.
Prepare your call center and customer support team with software that makes it easy to give great customer service. When customers have concerns or questions, allow agents to make decisions that offer first time resolution. For example, when you have an IVR routing customers to multiple departments it can get frustrating. Introducing new channels means people don’t have to sit on hold and agents can field cases via SMS or webchat. Make it simple and easy for people to work for your business also makes it simple and easy to work with your brand.
Connect Your Channels in a True Omnichannel Environment
According to a recent report by Aberdeen Group, companies with extremely strong omnichannel customer engagement retain on average 89% of their customers. Companies with weak omnichannel customer engagement retain only 33% . An omnichannel platform empowers agents with data and gives customers choices. A true omnichannel platform can scale your support model and grow your business beyond the holiday peak period.
Put Reporting Infrastructure in Place
You don’t just want to make this holiday season the brightest, you want the merriment to continue for seasons to come. In order to continually improve you need to track your activity. Put a system in place that allows you to monitor customer behavior and pull key metrics from interactions. Ideally, the system should integrate seamlessly with all of your channels and allow you to uncover buried information, reveal important trends, and visualize key performance drivers on the fly.
Leverage AI to Capture Contextual Information
Regardless of your feelings about AI, it’s here to stay. Automation technology is proving to be an immensely useful tool for enhancing customer service efforts.
Customers today are demanding, but they’re also self-reliant. AI-driven solutions make it possible for customers to self serve whether agents are on or off the clock. They’ve become ever more popular for simple use cases like order tracking or predictive recommendations and reminders.
About LiveVox
LiveVox is a leading provider of enterprise cloud contact center solutions, managing more than 12+ billion interactions a year across a multichannel environment. With over 15 years of pure cloud expertise, we empower contact center leaders to drive effective engagement strategies on the consumer’s channel of choice. Our leading-edge risk mitigation and security capabilities help clients quickly adapt to a changing business environment. With new features released quarterly, LiveVox remains at the forefront of cloud contact center innovation. Supported by over 450 employees and rapidly growing, we are headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Atlanta, Bangalore, and Colombia. To learn more, schedule a demo today.