The holiday season is not just about eating cookies, watching movies and shopping perfect gifts. It’s the busiest time for retailers both big and small. While preparing for the mad holiday rush, it’s essential that your entire team is on the same page. Both business owners and managers need to realize that the load during active shopping season increases and it is necessary to take additional actions to keep customer satisfaction high.
Moreover, shoppers during holiday sales buy not only gifts, they also sneak items into baskets for themselves. Thus the load increases not only on customer service team, but also on other departments responsible for packing and shipping.
In this blog post we will share 5 useful tips to keep customer satisfaction high during holiday rush.
Hire seasonal customer service agents
According to National Retail Federation last year Americans spent $370 billion on holiday shopping with online and other non-store sales making up roughly $167.8 billion of that total. While most part of businesses try to cope with holiday load by encouraging workers to say longer and work additional shifts, smart leaders analyze the load and hire seasonal employees to meet the demand in online orders.
Such measures help keep customer service level high and avoid key employees burnout during the busiest season.
Let your customers contact you through live chat
Web chat tool is a smart addition to your customer service tools. Together with self service options it helps to enhance your customer support speed and significantly decrease waiting time. Live chat agents can efficiently handle several chats concurrently and provide all information they cannot provide during phone calls.
By adding live chat button to your website, you will give your customers an opportunity to contact you when it is convenient for them. This helps to increase satisfaction level and improve customer experience. Moreover, by adding a holiday themed live chat icon and chat window logo, you will create that memorable holiday experience your customers will definitely enjoy.
Deliver your products timely
“Deliver as promised” – should be your motto for this season. Any delays are not accepted as this will instantly decrease satisfaction level and will become the reason for negative reviews. Before purchasing many consumers read feedback on social media and make decisions based on reviews.
You can get all orders in the world. However, if you run out of stock and cannot deliver on time, you will disappoint customers and risk losing them. Thus, to keep your customers satisfied you need to:
- align your promotions and sales
- bring holiday spirit to your website
- forecast your demand based on sales data from previous holiday season
- choose fulfillment centers close to common shipping destinations
- notify your suppliers about expected orders volume
- closely monitor daily order performance
- outsource order fulfillment
Add self service options to your website
By implementing self service options on your website you will save time both for your customers and your customer service team. However, try to keep the golden mean and let your customers get in touch with your team easily without obtrusive self service offers. Bots cannot replace human customer service today, no matter how smart they are. And if your customers want to talk with your agents, let them do this easily without additional obstacles.
The main goal of self service is to stay unobtrusively at your customers’ fingertips.
Run loyalty program to encourage repeated purchases
Loyalty programs help retain customers and encourage them to make repeat purchases. During your holiday sales you can attract new customers who will come to you because of great discounts or smart marketing campaign. However, your loyalty program will encourage them to come back and view your offers and continue purchasing in your store.
Holiday season may become quite stressful but profitable at the same time. There are so many things you need to take into account and lots of pieces of a big puzzle you need to put together to get a clear picture of your successful holiday shopping season. There will be always unexpected challenges and failures. But to minimize your effort, stress level and losses follow our recommendations to keep customer satisfaction high.
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