Customer service and live chat support during the Holiday season is both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to hold on to your live chat agents when trying to book the same three days off while the opportunity is to grab more customers and beat the competition with great support when customers hugely require it.
Whether you work in e-commerce or live in the B2B world, this guide will provide you with four simple tips to provide excellent chat support experience during the holiday season. Christmas is a few months away, and this blog post is timed to provide you tips in advance to prepare for the holiday season.
Tip#1: Go with the trend
Your chat volume or ticket volume from the previous year can be a good starting point to plan for the holiday season. We used this example from our HappyFox Help Desk, where this heat map clearly shows the volume split up of requests from various channels.
This information about chat volume can be useful to decide how many agents are required, and at what time of the day you expect the customer volume to shoot up.
Secondly, you can set your goals based on the feedback you have received from your buyers in the last holiday season. Analyze your hits and misses and accordingly align your customer support and service best practices.
Bonus tip: You can also check with your marketing and sales team to estimate increased chat volume due to promotions and offers.
Tip#2: Chatbots for your holiday rush
AI Chatbots are virtual assistants that can integrate with your live chat app and chat with your website visitors.
Chatbots can offer multiple benefits to your team, especially during the holiday season:
- Chatbots are available 24/7.
- Chatbots can save employees from the agony of answering the same questions.
- A well-programmed FAQ bot can resolve up to 20 percent of the queries, making the overall customer support process swift and effective.
Tip#3: Get the workflow ready with live chat features
Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the festive season like Christmas; are some of the days when online traffic is at its all-time high. And yet, your agents still have to meet your KPIs or even exceed them.
For this purpose, you need to make sure that you have all automation and workflows to help agents boost agents one step closer to the goal.
Divide your team into departments: Give responsibility to handle Sales, Billing, Logistics queries to different agents based on their expertise. HappyFox Chat provides a pre-chat form to enter department information to ensure your query is directed to the right agent. Provide spot-on support even during peak hours.
Use the mobile app: Your agents won’t be chained to their desks but they still will be able to respond to your website visitors in no time.
Canned Responses: Create automated replies for FAQs. Consider your most common holiday questions, around shipping times or payments, and craft some detailed responses you can easily share. It may seem insignificant, but every keystroke saved is time spent attending to more customers.
Live Typing Preview: Read while your customer is still typing the message. Capture customer intent effectively and respond faster.
IP Blocking: Disturbance from spam chats during peak hours can make agents lose their nerves. Banning the IP can be a great resort to help the agents better attend the buyers rather than the spammers.
Tip#4: Appreciate Holiday Chat Agents
The more considerate you are with your employees, the more they will be encouraged to help your customers.
All support agents have a hard time during the holiday season. They work under pressure, deal with dozens of chats, and meet KPIs, yet; they still have to keep their communication professional. The key to high customer satisfaction is a happy, motivated team. To do that, you need to engage them and reward their efforts.
Make sure that you create the right work environment for your employees. Giving employees comp-off, giving them an extra bonus for working during holidays, and allocating work timing in chunks (so that the agents can enjoy a part of the day with family) can ensure employee well being.
The Last Word
Make the most challenging season of the year the most profitable season for your business. We hope you will find these tips helpful as you work to provide exceptional customer support throughout the holiday season and all year long.
