With less than four months available before the biggest days of the retail industry i.e., Black Friday and Cyber Monday, retail and e-commerce businesses must gear up to deliver not just products but also superior customer service. After all, these events give you a tremendous opportunity to make a great first impression and create lifelong customers.
According to Adobe Analytics Data, consumer spending during 2018 Black Friday weekend brought in $6.2 billion in online sales, a growth of 23.6% year over year. It is okay to feel overwhelmed while preparing for these big days and the holiday season that follows.
But if you start preparing from now, chances are you will be ready to take on any volume of customer interaction during these days and deliver exceptional customer experience.
So, how can you start preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Ameridial, a leading retail call center, has a few tips up its sleeves. We’ve gained these insights while serving as the customer service unit of some retail stalwarts and would love to share them with you.
Prepare A List of FAQs
Identifying the possible issues your customers can face during the sale season is a good place to start. Go through the previous year’s data to find out the most important reasons your customers contacted you. Get a list of frequently asked questions ready and prepare their answers. You can then post these answers in the FAQ section for your customers to find.
This way, your customers will have access to the answer to the questions they want to ask, and your customer service team too will have answers ready. When the call volume is high, you cannot go looking for answers.
Bring Additional Hands on The Deck
Calculate your workload for that weekend and manage your workforce accordingly. Here’s a basic example of workload calculation.
Last year you had 100 unique customers and handled 40 queries. So, your contact ratio will be 40/100 = 0.4. Now multiply the contact ration by the estimated number of customers you expect to have an idea of the customer service needs over the weekend. Once you have an idea about the total customer service, need you can manage your workforce accordingly.
Don’t think your customer service team has the capability or time to handle that much call volume? Hire an experienced retail call center to manage your customer service. However, you must gear up for a holiday retail call center like Ameridial soon as hiring and training agent takes time.
We can speak from our experience that no matter how well you prepare, unexpected call spikes can happen anytime. In such cases, we make additional resources available internally to ensure that your customers do not have to suffer a long wait time.
Pay Attention to Information Security
Information security should always be your top priority, with all the personal consumer information, including credit card details being exchanged. You need to take an integrated approach to security. This will instill your customer’s trust in your brand and drive better loyalty.
Make sure the call center you are planning to team up with has an extensive fraud and security certification. The agents must be vetted with background credit and criminal checks. Your agents’ computer systems have to be up-to-date to ensure it is free from viruses, spyware, and adware. You can also track and monitor every agent activity with trackers.
Ameridial is compliant with PCI DSS standards and takes information security very seriously. We generally do not employ temporary agents to ensure better data security. All our agents go through a stringent verification process before joining. Our systems are always up-to-date, devoid of any security threats.
Do Not Skimp On Service Quality
Customers today have high service expectations from brands, especially during the holiday season, where they have a lot of other options. They will not take a kindly if the service experience goes south during that time. Therefore, you must train your agents to deliver superior service quality.
Agent empowerment, instilling confidence, and ongoing skill development are some of the ways of preparing your agents to deliver fast service without compromising on customer experience. Your agents should be able to resolve calls fast and provide accurate information to your customers. Doing so will up the customer satisfaction level and result in improved customer experience.
At Ameridial, we invest in the skill development of our agents. With our clients’ permission, we empower our agents with some decision-making power. It results in more responsible and dedicated agents who can deliver a personalized service to each customer.
Are you geared up for Black Friday weekend and the holiday season? Team up with a retail call center like Ameridial to ensure that high call volume does not affect the experience of your customers.
