Hey Community members,

After a very successful Happy Hour yesterday, where we got to meet many of you (we’ll have a recording up soon), we move onto Day 5. On the agenda for today is reflecting on and learning from past experiences by customer support teams/ agents to stay optimized this holiday season.

The holidays are a time for candy canes, plum cakes and parties. But, as a customer support agent, this time of the year might not be as jolly. 

While the holiday rush is accompanied with a dose of madness, it is also a crucial time to wow your customers.

Here are some hacks to wrap up the festive season with ease (some from our very own members):

 Use of documents & guides: @finn says, “Written documents are life saving! Last year we had nothing on workflows or project maps. Now we are ready to deal with any enormous change. The only thing we have to do is update the documents 🙂 I think that Fresh provides very useful tools on the help desk. Dashboard announcements, solutions, forums, etc made a difference!”

 Importance of technology: @manns says, “Use technology to take off the strain of the holidays. Whether self-help and self-service capabilities or the use of automation (including intelligent automation) to augment CS staff capabilities. It’s hopefully the “better, faster, cheaper” than most business functions need.”

 Being proactive on all support channels. Here’s an example: Amazon, the giant retailer adopted the Andon Cord principle for products that it ships to customers. When Amazon receives repeated complaints of the same defect in one product, the support agent pulls the Andon Cord to investigate the inventory and to stop sales of the product on the website. And until the issue is fixed, the product will not be available for buying.

Don’t let customers wait in line for their problem to be solved.

 Trend analysis: As always, rely on data. It is critical to review trends, metrics, patterns from last year and the few months leading up to the holiday season. Some of the historical data you could gather includes Ticket volume trends, FAQs, Preferred channels, time pattern etc.

 Be extra transparent: With a spike in sales, there is also bound to be a spike in returns/ refunds / exchanges. You're only going to help your support team and your customers by being loud and clear about the refund policy -lay these out very unambiguously to save everyone some time. 

We’d love to hear your insights in how you have planned to take on the seasonal rush. The more experiences shared, the better the takeaway for our members.

See you in the comments.

#12DaysofRefreshCommunity #Day5