Last Updated on August 31, 2023 by David
10 tips and tricks to prepare your teams.
Holidays are just around the corner. That means an endless amount of gatherings, food, and most importantly, shopping. For you folks who live and breathe eCommerce, it’s the perfect time to start ramping up efforts to make sure customers stay happy throughout the chaos. You’ve worked insanely hard all year to be a customer-focused brand and cultivated a culture for customer happiness, don’t let the holiday rush get the best of you and diminish all that hard work! Here are 10 tips and tricks to help any customer team succeed the rush.
#1 Polishing up your branding
The holiday season is all about moving inventory. New inventory needs announcing. Old inventory needs promoting. Newsletters, on-site promotions, discount coupons, re-engagement campaigns, targeted reach outs, etc. Whatever your plans are, make sure your branding is in sync with each other. Some things to pay attention to: fonts, font sizes, colors, icons, logos, images, hashtags, blurbs, product descriptions, prices, contact points such as your email addresses, etc. Your social media brands might need some polishing as well. For common channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, make sure messaging across each is consistent!
#2 Reorganizing your Knowledge Base / FAQ
Customers will have more frequently asked questions than ever before. Make sure your knowledge base / FAQ has been reorganized to predict and prioritize the most common articles to help customers navigate the purchasing experience. Most articles should need a bit of editing to fit the holiday context. For example, it’s perfectly reasonable for shipping to be delayed by the post office during the holidays. Make that known to customers and prevent unnecessary frustration/friction.
#3 Revising your response templates
Most of you are probably familiar with response templates (canned responses). You’ll likely need a few more just for the holiday rush. FAQ articles can often be repurposed as response templates and there’s no shame in doing that! We don’t use response templates all that often ourselves but it’s increasingly crucial to add commonly used blurbs as response templates to generate customer happiness faster. This is also be a good time to review all your spelling and grammar.
#4 Upping your engagement points on your site/store
Make it easier for customers to contact your support team through the holiday season. That means making your email address more transparent, your embedded contact forms more obvious, your contact forms more front and center. If you use a solution like Reamaze, you can easily tweak your widget to be larger/brighter and change the time based triggers to be more proactive. The goal here is to inform customers that you’re here to help more so than ever before.
#5 Reviewing your 3rd party app integrations
Hopefully, by tweaking your engagement points, you’ll have more valuable and engaging conversations with customers than ever before. Don’t let that go to waste, though. We highly recommend double checking your 3rd party app integrations to collect all the customer data you can. Use Slack? Make sure each channel operates correctly. Have a CRM app? Make sure customer data profiles are being populated correctly. Use MailChimp? Make sure customers are being added to your mailing lists as quickly as possible.
#6 Create additional automation workflows
Automate mundane tasks so you’re not overloading your support team unnecessarily. Reamaze Workflows can help you automatically reply to conversations, tag conversations, assign conversations and much more based on very specific triggers such as incoming address, keywords, or even subject lines. If you have access to automation, make sure to set some up today to help clear out irrelevant emails. The most often use case are notification or confirmation emails that tend to clutter up your inbox.
#7 Setting up clear roles and permissions
Making sure your team is well staffed can make all the difference. That could mean bringing on a few folks from other teams to help out with support or hiring some contractors to help manage social media conversations. If you do plan on having more people join the support team, make sure you have clear roles set up for each member so they have access to the right channels. Permissions can help you manage contractors easily and make sure they don’t touch channels that don’t require their assistance. If you use Reamaze, you can easily create roles and customize them down to the notification level.
#8 Start tracking performance today
Performance during the holiday rush is the ultimate stress test for any customer service team. You’ll collect more meaningful data in a span of 2 months than you might all year. This is why we encourage all support teams establish a set of metrics to measure starting today and track them throughout the end of the year. What are your response times like? What’s your overall volume for any given channel? Which FAQ articles are being read most? Which support agent has the best performance? How happy are customers? Meaningful data can lay the groundwork for next year and set your team up for success.
#9 Training your teams on key communication points
Do not dive into the holiday rush without discussing your customer service strengths and weaknesses. Make a checklist for things to watch out for and potential resolutions for each key scenario. Make sure each team member is aware of how to escalate certain issues, where to go for specific resources, and that each person is in sync on ongoing promotions, discounts, and inventory status. Remember, customer service during the holidays is a test of your support team’s aptitude and drive. Work as a team and you’ll make great impressions on customers.
#10 Model the right behavior among your teams
Customer service during the holidays is the best opportunity to up your game and deliver an even better level of service to customers. If things do get out of hand or shit hits the fan, make sure to keep your cool. Continue to treat your employees the way you want your customers treated and expect everyone else to do the same. To succeed, each team needs to become a role model for other teams.
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You can also find our multi-brand, multi-channel customer service platform at https://www.reamaze.com. Follow @reamaze.