Maintaining Customer Focus and Investing in Agents During the Busy Holiday Season

Christmas lights twinkling on every house and Christmas music playing in every business make me want to remain at home, watch It's a Wonderful Life, and avoid doing work. Is it just me? No, I don't believe so.

It makes no difference what sort of job you have. Every year, as Christmas approaches, everyone becomes less eager to work.

It's much simpler to check out and use the vacation time we've accrued. As a contact center manager, though, you don't have the option of leaving early.

The end of the year signals the completion of a lengthy list of deadlines, the tying up of loose ends, and the preparation of your team for the next year.

Your consumers still need you, even if your agents want to go. They're loading up on Christmas presents and making end-of-year purchases.

And, as a result, throughout the Christmas season, you must place the most emphasis on the consumer. During the hectic Christmas season, how do you keep your agents focused on your clients' needs?

And, more importantly, how do you keep your agents motivated and stress-free?

We've developed a list of topics to concentrate on over the holidays to help you prioritize your staff and consumers.

Make sure your self-service tools are up to date

Your personnel is stretched thin due to PTO requests, and you have an increase of consumer demands during the Christmas rush. Updating your self-service tools is a simple approach to relieve stress on your personnel while keeping the emphasis on your customers.

73 percent of clients prefer to settle their concerns via a company's website. Despite this, 55% of consumers found self-service technologies to be difficult to use. Self-service allows your consumers to rapidly discover solutions to their queries without having to wait on hold or repeat their narrative via live chat.

It also guarantees that the clients that contact your representatives are those who have more complicated problems.

Retain your self-service tools up to date and simple to use in order to keep the emphasis on your clients' time and free up your agents for more difficult jobs.

Increase your empathy for your clients by providing prompt service

For many people, the Christmas season is stressful because of family difficulties, financial concerns, and hectic schedules. When your consumers contact you, they're probably juggling a lot of things. Delivering rapid and effective service is linked with offering empathy to consumers in the middle of the chaos.

Most cranky clients are just having a terrible day, according to seasoned customer care representatives. Coach your agents to begin each client engagement with compassionate calm and a focus on quick solutions to deliver the finest service possible during this period.

Focus on your consumer this time of year by emphasizing action and resolution above warm fuzzies. It's OK to skip the "Happy Tuesday!" greeting in favor of a discussion about last night's football game. Instead, concentrate on your consumers by quietly assisting them in resolving their issues.

Communicate with consumers on a regular basis

Christmas is a great time to express gratitude to your consumers. So, why not go above and above to assist your customers?

It's all about taking action when it comes to proactive customer service. Customer service is when a company anticipates a customer's wants and provides solutions before problems escalate into irritated exchanges.

You must know your clients in order to provide proactive customer support. Take some time to go through your contact center's data and comb through your previous client surveys.

Examine the most pressing concerns that your clients face. Then make contact! Send out an email to all of your customers with some helpful hints. Make it more personal by designating a list of clients to each agent to email.

Use your data strategically to make consumers feel heard, to anticipate concerns, and to reduce the number of customers that contact you during the hectic Christmas season.

Wherever feasible, automate

Automation is most effective when it is utilized to supplement, rather than replace, your consumers' human-to-human interactions. You don't have to rely on technology to cover for your agents during the holidays.

Instead, by properly using it, you can retain your focus on your consumer while freeing up your agents to handle more complicated customer interactions.

Simple operations like giving coaching advice to employees, consolidating customer data into clear reports, and routing calls to provide consumers assistance quickly may all be automated in your cloud contact center platform. Integrate automation into your live chat and IVR systems to provide consumers with self-service choices across all channels.

Make an investment in your agents

Let's face it: working over the holidays is a pain. If you want your agents to perform high-quality work over the holidays, you must recognize that they are foregoing time with their families and friends to be at work.

To keep client attention while still investing in your agents throughout the Christmas season, you must be more flexible and inventive.

Consider the following ideas for engaging your agents during the holidays:

• Provide incentives for workers who work less-desirable shifts and ensure that those who do so are acknowledged. To encourage agents to work difficult-to-staff hours, consider offering additional pay, gift cards, or a free supper. Also, be helpful and adaptable to your workers' demands so that they may spend time with their families and friends.
• Encourage your employees to be healthy. Everyone needs a mental health day now and again, especially after the previous two years. If your agents are burned out, they won't be able to provide effective service or concentrate on each individual consumer. If you have the capacity to provide staff with a day off to relax, take use of it.
• Don't be afraid to get into the festive mood. Make work enjoyable! During lunch breaks, play holiday games. Organize a Christmas raffle. Have a gift exchange with a mystery Santa.

Thanks to Laura Krajewski at Business 2 Community whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.