With the holidays around the corner, companies are getting ready for their busiest time of the year. While you are taking stocks of your wares and preparing for the most profitable time of the year, your customer service team has to wear themselves out responding to the increased volume of customer queries and complaints. During this time, most customer service teams struggle to maintain the service level their customers have come to expect from them.
There are several customer service challenges businesses face during the holiday season. You can tackle most of them by merely hiring an experienced call center that can not only deliver high-quality customer service and customer experience but can also provide you with a cost advantage.
Here are the top 5 customer service challenges for businesses. We will also find out how a call center can help them tackle the situations:
Challenge 1 – No Capabilities To Flex Up For The Overall Season
Since most businesses have a small customer service team, they can hardly manage the call spikes during the busiest time of the year. After all, it is not possible to hire a large number of customer service agents you need to manage the holiday call spikes. That would be a waste of money.
How A Call Center Can Help
When you hire a call center to ensure all your calls get answered, they can work alongside your inhouse customer service team and deliver a superior customer service during that time.
Challenge 2 – Lack Of Flexible Workforce To Flex Up For A Few Days Or Hours
Most in-house call center teams lack a flexible workforce. Therefore, they cannot flex up for a few days or hours during the peak season.
How A Call Center Can Help
A call center can hire and train additional resources quickly and therefore can flex up for a few days or hours when the customer call volume is supposed to skyrocket. Having extra hands on the deck allows a business to maintain service quality even when managing an increased call volume.
Challenge 3 – Long Hold Times
Long hold times (i.e., your customers are waiting in queue for a long time) can be very frustrating, and result in a bad customer experience. It also may drive up your handle times. According to recent research, long hold time is among the top customer pain points and during the holidays, this pain can become unbearable due to unexpected call spikes.
How A Call Center Can Help
An experienced call center can work as an extension to your customer service team and handle calls on your behalf. As a result, your customers do not have to wait a long time in a call queue and can promptly get their issues resolved. Even in case of unexpected call spikes many call centers can offer virtual callback queue, which allows callers to opt out of holding at a certain point, and they are automatically called back when it is their turn in the queue. It will help you improve your service levels as well as customer satisfaction level.
Challenge 4 -Long Average Handling Time (AHT)
Long average handling time (i.e., the time spent on talking, hold, and after-call work) is a staple challenge for the customer service team during the holidays. It leaves your customers frustrated and causes significant dissatisfaction.
How A Call Center Can Help
When your customer calls are handled by experienced call center agents, the AHT tends to be shorter. These agents are proficient in dealing with tough customers and can easily lessen customer dissatisfaction with high quality and prompt customer service. Also hiring a call center during the holidays to handle the call spike of the holidays allow you to lower your hold time and minimize customer dissatisfaction.
Challenge 5 – Rising Cost
The rising cost of operation is not only a challenge during the holidays, but it remains a challenge all year long. However, as you often have to hire more employees to handle the holiday call spike, the cost of operations goes significantly up during the holidays.
How A Call Center Can Help
Hiring a call center allows you to hire agents for a lot less than what you had to pay a regular employee. You also do not have to pay a hefty sum for buying the equipment and technologies used. As a result, hiring a call center brings down the cost significantly.
Are you thinking about hiring a call center to manage the holiday rush? Fusion CX can be a perfect call center partner for you. We have a long experience of delivering outstanding customer service to our clients’ businesses and have received accolades for the same. For more information on our customer service offering, contact us today!
