The holiday season, though heartily welcomed, can be an overwhelming experience, especially for businesses that benefit from the rush. Companies with holiday-specific products or services or those offering season promotions prepare themselves for an overflow of consumer calls and emails. Lucky for you, these tips and tricks can help you manage call volume during the holidays, allowing you to serve customers more efficiently.
Handling Call Volume During the Holidays
Whether you are a small business or an e-commerce giant, the holidays put everyone to test. And so, if you are a company expecting a high call volume, you should be ready to make the most of the holiday rush. You could get more customer service agents and employees to answer incoming calls. Or, you could use features that come along with a business number from a virtual phone number provider like United World Telecom (www.unitedworldtelecom.com). With these features, it is possible to distribute incoming calls with call forwarding and call transfer abilities, and more. Let’s look at some ways to tackle a high call volume during the holidays.
Be Proactive Ahead of Time
Don’t wait until the last minute. Start early by hiring temporary or seasonal staff. Purchase necessary equipment, virtual communication tools, or content management systems to collect and organize customer data. Train employees to answer calls within the company’s standard and also to use new equipment or software so that everything is ready to go.
Document Everything to Cover All Details
A rush of calls can often result in missing information, misunderstandings, or incomplete tasks. And so, documenting everything becomes absolutely necessary. Having a customer relationship management (CRM) system can prove helpful in this case. Additionally, recording calls can help keep track of:Â
- Who called
- The purpose of the call
- Whether the issue was resolved
- If the transaction took place
- Any other important information about the customer.
Operate Multichannel Communication
Don’t stick to desk phones exclusively. Besides your call center and customer service team, use chat portals, emails, instant messaging, and social media platforms as well. You will notice that most customer concerns can be solved easily and quickly over chat or SMS, saving space for a more serious issue to be discussed over the phone. In fact, most customers expect these channels of communication as well.Â
Utilize Virtual Communication Features
Virtual phone service providers can help you set up call forwarding in a couple of different ways:
- Forward calls to different office locations during specific times of the day.
- Route calls to different departments based on customer responses to an automated greeting like an interactive voice response (IVR).
- Have calls ring on multiple phones simultaneously until someone answers.
- Direct calls to back-up numbers in a pre-determined list, if the first number appears busy.
- Forward calls to remote, temporary employees.
You can also create customized and appropriate holiday greetings and voicemail messages to add a personal touch.
Observe and Analyze
Another important aspect of managing holiday call volume is learning and improving. For example, call tracking records can help you determine how many calls you receive and where they are coming from. This can give you insights into your ROI and marketing efforts. Real-time data, as well as for analytics and metrics, can assist customer service reps in handling concerns with data of past trends. Consider this: if you have data telling you what times of the day you receive most calls, you can create strategies to tackle those hours specifically.
Don’t Depend Entirely on the Robots
Automation like chatbots and automated replies can only do so much. Some cases need closer, human, personalized attention. This is where you may need to bring new seasonal or permanent agents on board or hire a smaller call center service to handle calls for a few months.
Closing: Manage Call Volume, Boost Customer Relations
Holiday call volume can make or break your company. Services that cannot handle the holiday rush end up losing valuable returning customers and their business. And that is bad news. Prepare early and put efficient processes into place so that when the time comes, your employees are ready!
Meryl D’Sa writes content for various travel and communication publications. She also conducts interviews for literary organizations.
