Your organization needs to buckle up and plan how your holiday support is a bit more structured.
Are you ready to welcome the busiest time of the year? Because in a matter of a few weeks, the holiday rush is here!
As consumers prepare for the biggest holiday season, your business should do so too. Whether you’re doing an e-commerce business, retail, or if you live in the B2B marketing world, this article is for you.
So, put your hats ready for Santa and get your head on the game as we handle customer complaints this time of the year.
What’s it like for customers during the holiday rush?
Customers are overly stressed out over the holiday season. It’s where end-of-the-year work deadlines and personal obligations meet. There’s last minute grocery runs, gift shopping, cooking for the whole family, and rush hours.
Consumers are all over the online shopping applications and phone lines just to get in touch with customer support. Especially now that there’s a pandemic and quarantine measures, online shopping has offered surreal convenience for consumers.
But this convenience also comes bundled with its own challenges. There are customer complaints on shipping delays, refunds, mismatched products, and last minute holiday shopping inquiries. So, there really is a high potential for a customer’s buying journey to go awry.
In this chaotic scenario, customer support will be flooded with customer complaints and escalations. That’s why it’s necessary that everyone in the customer service team knows how to use positive language when addressing customer complaints.
Tips on how to handle customer complaints during the holidays
To give you some ideas how you and your support team can handle customer complaints, we’ve listed down surefire tips below:
Stay current on trends
This does not only apply to Christmas, but to all seasons within the year. If your customer service team is current on the latest trends, they would have good expectations on what customers’ complaints will be coming their way.
You can refer to your help desk software to check for the volume of customer complaints during the last year’s season. You can determine what products or services are the most called about by buyers too.
You can also check what channels are mostly preferred by customers to contact you.
Knowing all of these will have you prepared for the high volume of customer complaints. You can appropriate staffing needs, and resources to the areas that matter most.
If you have a dedicated marketing team, ask for forecasts of holiday rush sales that consumers are rummaging for. Since it’s the holiday season, you might be wondering if you have to send generic email greetings for Christmas Day or New Years Day.
Tip: People are now in vacation mode, so they’re less likely to read their emails. Pause them if you can!
Set customer expectations
Since your customer service team will handle a high volume of calls, the first thing you need to do is set your customers’ expectations.
Apart from letting them know that you’re receiving a lot of calls, you also have to notify them of any changes in schedule or availability of their product-related concerns.
It’s also important to let them know that your responses may come a little later so that they can contact you at an earlier date. Always note that it’s better to underpromise and overdeliver instead of the other way around.
Reward your employees
Santa couldn’t make all the gifts by himself. It’s teamwork! You have to reward your employees that went the extra mile for the holiday season.
If you keep your elves happy, they will pass it on to your customers. Your support team is always the face and the initial contact of your business. You need to find ways to motivate them so they can perform at their best.
Rewarding your employees can go a long way in having them inspired in handling customer complaints during the busiest time of the year.
You can award them by hosting a holiday lunch party or Christmas party. It’s also a big positive move to give out holiday bonuses to your teams. Don’t forget to incentivize your top performers and declare your agents of the month.
Wishing you a merry customer experience
Your organization needs to buckle up and plan how your holiday support is a bit more structured. These might be a few tips but surely can change the way your team handles customer complaints.
Holidays might be challenging but if you have a prepared, and welcoming customer support funnel can also empower your team to deliver excellent customer experience.
