[JOIN IN] Hang Out with Hot Chocolate: Managing Customer Service During the Holidays ☕

A1: As someone who has been on the frontline of customer service especially during the holidays, I would say a good few weeks are needed to plan, re-plan, and execute it. Planning ahead helps you spot gaps in your current training or format of support and gives you enough time to build or crowdsource resources needed for your support team. It also gives you ample time to organize a library of content for your team’s new and existing support reps to use.  

A4: 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 updating the documents I think that Fresh provides very useful tools on the help desk. Dashboard announcement, solutions, forums, etc made difference!

A3

Setting expectations, in advance, about what a season will bring may help prepare the team and even prevent “burn-out”. To me, the customer service role should be fun as you get to solve challenges (problems) and help others.

 

I prepare my teams with what to expect and provide role-play and training on how to handle difficult situations. When they successfully manage difficult tickets, they should feel recharged and successful. Hence, one way to avoid burn-out.

 

We discuss the types of situations and the people reach out for help and discuss what is happening in the customer’s world. Do they need help now? Do they have pressure on them to get a job done quickly but our software is slowing them down? And try to create empathy for the customers.

 

In preparation, we acknowledge that some customers are friendly, others grateful and others challenging. By providing role play and tools for each situations and helping the service team turn a challenging customer into a fan, is a great goal to set and support. And can revitalize the team.

 

We can’t be everything to everyone HOWEVER we can respond with understanding, honesty and compassion.

When tools for working with challenging customers are provided, the results can be energizing and rewarding on its own. Thus, revitalizing the representative and fending off burn-out. They can get charged and excited to help the next person.

 

At times, our team will laugh at customer situations and customer frustrations. When that happens, I feel we fell short. Instead, when challenging customer stories are shared, it would be nice to work as a team on ideas of how we could improve on that customer’s experience with us. I feel that when I speak to a representative and even when they can’t help, if they listened and shared that they understood, I still felt it was a good experience. And I am energized!

A1: We started in October this year.

A1: We started in October this year.

As the ONLY Agent/Admin running Freshdesk, how do I spot my own gaps?  LOL. I guess I need to do some more Academy training….

It was a great session today chatting away about customer service during the holidays. Feel free to keep the conversation going everyone! Thank you so much, @Lea France, @finn, @BrendaM, @Sean.Daly, @DaniCSI, @Alice, @n.winslow, @TheresaDorr and @manns for joining us for our last coffee chat in 2021.

Shout-out to @rhea.desouza, my friend and colleague for helping me co-host this event. 

See you again with another edition next year! Until then, stay safe, take care, and happy holidays 

If you enjoyed this, make sure to tune into to our upcoming happy hour with @manns! Sign up here and catch him live: https://www.freshworks.com/events/happy-hour-with-stephen-mann/

A1 - I feel each organization should have a plan in place for holiday closures since they happen every year at different times of the year. In my mind, that plan should be broken down into phases leading up to the holiday, and the aspects of those phases will differ depending on how long the break will be. For instance, if I am preparing for Memorial Day per my holiday plan I may have my internal team begin informing customers that we will be closed for the holiday one week in advance - informing them in conversation as well as with a blip in their support signature. If I have 3rd party support providers or depots I rely on, I will communicate with them about a month out from a single day of business closure.

If I’m preparing for two days out of the office, like over Christmas or New Years I will have my team inform customers of our closures 2 weeks out and I will have 3rd party support services prepared at 45 days out.

A1: I think two months will be good to measure different statistics on how the team deal with the issues in terms of resolution time, knowledge base, etc. Hiring a seasonal employee may slow down the workflow beacuse most of the experienced employees will work on those employees’ fails to fix it. This is time consuming process. The first month we can measure the former statistics. The second month, we can try new tools or flows. The third month (the hectic month) we can choose whether we use the former or new system.

A3: Ability to recognize burnout/ increased stress among employees, and act accordingly, especially during busy times. Improving communication channels between a manager and team member can definitely help.

A5: Prioritize employee health, especially if the things heat up during the holiday season -- ensure that agent concerns are addressed well ahead of time, they have an open space to offer feedback, and automate where possible and feasible to save agents time. At the end of the day, do everything and anything that is right for the customer and the employee. A couple of things that can be done: 

1. If your employee is out of office, make sure auto-responders go out to emails that go the particular rep’s inbox
2. Set expectations that can be met. Under promise and over-deliver to make sure customers don’t get frustrated. 

A4. There are many - and sometimes it’s the simplest things that work. For example, having employee-centric policies on holiday working. Some employees need and want to spend time with family, while others might be keen to work extra to pay for the costs of the holidays. It might seem like a good way to balance the scheduling books but what about the personal impact on the latter employees? Not only in terms of their wellbeing but also their performance. So set caps on extra working to protect those who want to work more than they can actually take (I hope this makes sense).

Another is protecting CS staff from angry callers - maybe due to holiday-impacting issues such as delivery delays or having to wait in a queue for way too long. Here, CS staff should be empowered to call out the customer behavior (and I’m often one of those bad customers) by stating that the organization wants to protect them from abuse and that the call will be terminated if the abuse continues.

I could keep going but here’s one final one - using technology to take the strain more. 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.

A5. My longer answer is:

1. Ensuring that lessons learned from previous years have been brought into BAU operations
2. Planning for all eventualities such that as many issues can be anticipated and fixes found before they happen (based on probability and impact of course)
3. Using feedback - from both customers and employees - to try to course correct on the fly
4. Empowering CS personnel by giving them some leeway when following policies and processes - this will help to get a win-win rather than one side of the engagement “losing”

I’m sure there’s more but I started late to the chat :)

I cannot wait until Tuesday This will be one of the most helpful events of coffee talks because the holiday rush is the most stressful period of the year. Hope I’ll find useful tips :)