The holiday season has arrived, and unlike any other time of year, it is the busiest. If you do not plan your customer support during this time of year, you will most likely miss out on a significant number of customers.
Naturally, holiday customer service may be stressful, but with proper planning and the correct customer service tools at your disposal, providing smooth, personalized, and proactive customer assistance can be a breeze.
Some facts and figures that determine why your eCommerce business needs superb customer support during the holiday season:
Most of the buyers will do 48% of their shopping on the dates between Thanksgiving and the end of the year
- Last-minute shoppers – 61% of the buyers will buy their last gifts during the week that ends on December 25th.
- over 20% of the annual sales occur during the holiday season, which is over 200% of what is expected during a non-holiday season
- Over 55% of holiday purchases will take place online – source
How to be there for customers during this holiday season?
Managing issues during the holiday season can be tough because of reasons like more sales and minimum staff during that time.
Retail e-commerce holiday season sales in the United States from 2016 to 2022
Here are some of the ways that can help you deliver exceptional customer service for your customers-
1. Automate tasks
With the holiday shopping season rapidly coming, one thing is certain: there will be no dull moments, at least for the next few weeks.
Repetitive tasks such as email tickets and organizing them might consume customer service teams’ capacity.
What if we told you that you could automate repetitive tasks so your customer support team can focus on more complex issues that require immediate attention?
You can quickly automate repetitive tasks and even segregate the clutter in your inbox.
You can, for example, route-specific emails to specific members of your team. Emails with the word ‘Payments’ in the subject line or the body of the email, for example, can be automatically assigned to the Finance team.
Aside from that, you can use ‘Tags’ to arrange emails by type or priority. Your teams no longer have to struggle with determining which emails are a priority and which are not.
In Kapture, issues are automatically tagged and prioritized on the basis of keywords and sentences used in the email or chat. Agents can work on urgent and high-priority issues, it is assigned to the one who is an expert in the particular category at once. This ensures that the issue is resolved at once and there is an improvement in metrics like FCR, AHT, TAT, etc.
2. Self-help portal for customers
Make it possible for the many clients who want to help themselves – self-service is a win-win situation for everyone. Customers are also time-pressed, so if they can discover an answer to their question without having to contact support, you’ve minimized the amount of work they need to waste. Furthermore, high-quality self-service solutions allow your agents to assist a greater number of clients overall, potentially improving holiday sales.
92% of customers say they would use a knowledge base and 83% say they’d use a community forum for self-service support if it is available – source
Creating a community for your devoted customer base might relieve you of a lot of stress. Particularly around the holiday season. Users can use the community to ask questions, hold discussions, and get answers. The great thing about having a community is that you don’t have to constantly solve their problems and answer their questions. Instead, other users who have encountered similar problems can provide appropriate solutions.
3. Omnichannel presence is a must
90% of customers expect consistent interactions across channels
You may establish a distinct voice for your business by utilizing centralization and data integration to meet the specific demands of each customer. Omnichannel assistance benefits both your customers and your support agents. It saves the support team’s bandwidth by bringing every query to a unified screen.
Because of the widespread use of smartphones, more customers are willing to use channels such as in-app chat, email assistance, phone, live chat, social media, and chatbots. You can broaden the scope of your customer involvement by connecting with them over many channels via data integration with omnichannel customer support.
Irrespective of the holiday season, your brand must have an omnichannel presence throughout the year to deliver a delightful service.
4. Train employees well
Employee customer service training is an excellent approach to getting everyone on the same page. Deliver exceptional service while consistently communicating your brand’s beliefs. Training allows your staff to become happier and more confident in their roles.
A knowledgeable and trained agent can handle more tickets and provide faster and more accurate resolutions.
A Learning Management System can help make your agents’ training sessions more enjoyable and interactive. Quizzes, assessments, discussion forums, and a variety of other methods can be used to keep your agents interested throughout the training sessions. Analyze results of assessments and reward the deserving agent to keep them motivated for the training.
5. A centralized knowledge base
With AI-powered knowledge with search capabilities, can help your agents find answers quickly.
With all information in one place, call center executives can find the correct information at the right moment. They can easily access information from a call center knowledge base.
Save search time that could be wasted in screen switching by having a seamless search for quick access to information. A consolidated knowledge base dramatically lowers agent errors because it contains all necessary and correct information.
Data pertaining to customers and their interaction history with the organization, tickets, resolutions supplied, and so on, are all historically preserved for future reference.
This enables agents to operate quickly while minimizing errors.
6. Empower agents with the right tools
Unsurprisingly, your live chat agents and customer support team will be swamped with assistance requests. Attending each and every ticket individually is a monumental task. Deploying a customer support system like Kapture can help your agents work more efficiently by removing unnecessary burdens from their shoulders. A powerful conversational AI-chatbot can bring in support tickets from the start to simple resolutions by combining the power of data and knowledge base.
Some of the other features include
- Canned responses for quick replies
- Ability to start side conversations with users who are not part of the system or with internal team members.
- Unified Customer View for you to know your customers inside-out in an elaborate customer data profile.
- Multilingual chat that helps agents understand and converse in customers’ local language to deliver a personalized experience.
- Notetaker can be used to take notes of client issues during a call for future reference.
Excellent customer service during the holiday season with Kapture
Clearly, your support agents will be dealing with some of the busiest weeks of the year, so make sure they have everything they need to go the extra mile and make this holiday season a success.
It is critical to plan ahead of time and has an active customer service strategy in place before the rush begins. Simplify things for support teams and allocate all of the resources they need to provide speedy, personalized, and effective customer service with Kapture.
About the Author | |
 | Ankit Kochar |
| Ankit Kochar is a content writer at Kapture CRM who loves to write creative as well as informative content. He has worked as a creative and academic content writer in the past and has a keen knowledge of writing reports, essays and dissertations. His current field is helping him research and hone his SaaS knowledge. | |
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