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hristmas holidays are near the corner. Your support staff has applied for leaves and you are wondering how to meet your customer service requests and ensure your customers are happy. True, customer service during the holiday season is a challenge for almost all companies. Holiday seasons record significant growth in sales activities across all industry sectors. Your website experiences more customer traffic during the holiday season. Sales and service requirements are in full swing. Further, the situation becomes even more tricky if you are operating in the retail sector. The demand for your product or service is higher than usual during the holiday season.
Customer service assists users with technical problems and also facilitates the sales process. Hence, delayed or no response to customer support requests may result in the loss of potential customers or even existing customers. If only there was a way to limit the number of support requests received during the holiday season.
We can prevent such outcomes with a little planning and efficient deployment of your help desk tool. So, prior planning and the right tools will ensure happy customers for your business. Read on to explore some of the best strategic means to limit the flow of service requests during the holiday season!!
How to minimize customer service requests during the holiday season
Make observations from past holiday trends
Historical data providing details of the number of customer service requests can be an important indicator for predicting the request volumes for the current holiday season. Review the figures and patterns to make accurate observations about the upcoming holiday season. Similarly, also make a note of the commonly reported issues or problems reported by your customers. Additionally, make a list of the information details required by your customers. You can now chalk out a structured plan to minimize the customer service requests based on the available estimates.
Empower your users
You can make it easy for your customers to find answers to their queries. Once the customers know where to find answers to their queries, they will not be raising service requests. Knowledge base and FAQs are some of the commonly used and efficient self-help tools available to the customers. So, make sure to provide adequate links to your knowledge base articles and the FAQ section. These links can be inserted into email notifications, blog posts, social media posts, or chatbot messages. The users will be easily re-directed to the relevant articles if they want additional information or when they face any issue.
Keep your knowledge base updated and simple
Out-dated information available in the knowledge base articles can be frustrating and misleading as well. Users will not find it helpful and this is bound to have a negative impact on your customer service. So, make sure the information available in the articles is updated. Additionally, you must also ensure that your articles are easy to follow and provides clear guidelines on the sequence of steps to be followed. Use multiple screenshots to illustrate the steps. Such illustrations increase the clarity of the actions required from the user’s end.
Use videos to illustrate complex tasks
Make several short videos on your product or service. Upload and link these videos to your knowledge base, blog posts, social media posts, or community pages. The objective is to make these videos easily available to your users. Short videos help in illustrating the exact steps that must be performed by users. It can also provide contextual information about the application of your product or service.
Configure your help desk to perform automated tasks
An efficient tool makes it possible to automate multiple customer service tasks. Some of these tasks include sending notifications to customers on their service requests. You can also setup auto-escalations if the reported issue is critical in nature. You can configure your help desk to escalate the requests to senior-level support representatives.
Setup chatbots to guide your customers
Chatbots are one of the trendiest tools designed to offload routine service requests from your customer support service agents. What’s even more interesting is that now you can script your own custom bot to resolve your customer queries and their information requests. Chatbots will be active round the clock, irrespective of time or occasions. You can script the bots to identify customer issues and re-direct them to relevant knowledge base articles. So, you can ensure routine customer service requests are resolved promptly by the bots.
Use mobile apps to route urgent support requests
There are several occasions when customer issues are urgent and need prompt action. You can use the help desk mobile apps to route the urgent support requests to the concerned experts. This kind of strategic plan will ensure that critical issues are addressed without any delay and customers are happy with your support services.
To put it in a nutshell, you can prepare for your holidays in advance and ensure complete customer satisfaction with the help of the right help desk tool. ngDesk is a cloud-based help desk tool designed to meet your precise business requirements effectively. The platform supports all the above-mentioned features that make it easier for you to manage your workforce and your customers in the most efficient manner. What’s more, ngDesk allows you to configure multiple automation that set your customer support team rolling smoothly.
So, what are you waiting for? Sign up today to avail these benefits and a whole lot more!!
