The holiday season is just around the corner and almost everyone can feel this excitement in the air. In this article, we will see “Customer Service During The Holidays“.

The holidays are always a time of happiness, but in a year like 2020, they seem to mean something more. They seem to be the beacon of hope in what has otherwise been an objectively difficult year.

Customer Service Industry is always busy during the holiday season. With retailers pushing out record marketing on one end, clients finalizing quarter budgets on the other, and customers finally coming around to look at what they need to be fixed in the holiday season,

Last few months of any year are usually filled with calls with clients- existing, prospective and new; and customers-confused, agitated and often, grateful for any help they can get during the busiest time of the year. 2020 is no different, and yet, it is entirely different.

For one, with the economic volatility and the budget cuts that have come around, calls with executives have tripled in number with new deals coming into play every other week.

Customers now need customer service more than ever, with no access to physical stores to get their products fixed.

Build on visual guides

Picture this. It’s the night before Christmas. Your agent is just about to get off work when your customer calls asking for help assembling the new toy with thirty moving parts which Santa is supposed to have gifted his son.

There’s a simple fix to avoid this circumstance- invest in visual guides. Visual guides are trending in customer service today because of their easy comprehensibility, widespread accessibility and versatile applicability. Customer Service During The Holydays

This helps improve customer experience and also reduces agent workload during a busy time of the year. In addition, visual guides can be adapted to a wide range of gadgets.

It also gives companies time to effectively build on the plan depending on changes that take place throughout the year.

Solutions take time

Experts in customer experience predict trends in customer service months, and sometimes years, ahead. Figures of innovation in this field attest maintenance of

This shouldn’t be any different for holiday season customer service. Often, many companies speak of having ambitious plans for combatting customer traffic but fall short of their goals either due to poor implementation of plans or due to inefficient planning.

The holiday season should be a good time to plan for next year’s holiday season, using the current year as a good starting point (base year) to make predictions off of.

However, a situation like this also provides an opportunity to plan for long term crisis-handling structure and the layout for a plan in the event of a contingency.

Companies also have the opportunity to plan for 2021, which heralds a more stable economy, greater retail service and larger customer traffic.

Invest in the cognitive decision tree

This is where decision trees enter the scene. Decision trees provide a sequential arrangement of problems that customers might encounter and consequently, offer solutions to those very problems.

Their structures allow for customer service providers to create streamlined decision-making processes for their customers.

This model offers quick and efficient solutions to customer problems and is usually accurate in their judgements of customer needs.

To increase the accuracy of decision trees, back end designing has increasingly come to involve integrating the model with artificial intelligence systems as well as CRM databases to enable system learning through system’s working.

This enables automated decision making through on the basis of previous decisions made in similar situations. Not only is this faster and more efficient, it also reduces agent intervention after the initial round of decision making processes.

Happy agents make a knowledge happy customer

Agent satisfaction is often overlooked when looking at overall performance metrics of customer service. While customer experience is of top priority, agent satisfaction is also an extremely important reflection of a company’s overall work culture and professional ethic.

There are many reasons why agents need to be happy. The most obvious one is the correlation between agent satisfaction and customer satisfaction.

The second reason is more specific to current times. With work now being remote, agents are placed in a scenario where they are often in their customers’ shoes.

Learning management systems are a great present This festive season, give your company executives and your agents the gift of a revamped knowledge based System. As mentioned before, with remote working, agents are now in their customers’ shoes. Customer Service During The Holidays

Gone are the days when an agent could tap another agent and get their help to solve a problem. Agents are now independent units who must find solutions on their own for their customers. In addition, working remotely in itself brings about its own set of challenges.

Build an organized knowledge base

There is no stratification of data, no content organization and no advanced search options. What you are working with is a monstrous amalgamation of content that has accumulated for the last 30 years.

Your customer is on your line- frantically looking for the right solution to his problem from you. What are the odds that you, as an agent, can find an accurate solution from this database quickly, understand entire content and then explain it to the caller on other ends of this line?

While this seems like an exaggerated situation with hints of glorified practices of early internet use, it is in fact the reality of an astonishingly large number of companies, including some of the biggest BPOs across the globe.

These also enable advanced search options, automation in the forms of decision trees, chatbots and visual guides; in addition to traditional sources such as articles and FAQs, and ensure that these different materials can be arranged in a range of different ways depending on agent and customer requirements.

Give gratitude. Get gratitude

2020 has been a year of constant learning and growth. If there’s one silver lining in a year which has otherwise been consistently challenging, it’s the lessons that we take away from it.