Call Center Management Featured Article
How Call Center Management Can Plan for the Holiday Rush
With so much build up over the last month, it’s hard to believe another Christmas has come and gone. Consumers have opened all of their gifts, made the first round to the local retail stores to complete their exchanges or take advantage of the first discounts and are slowly coming out of the “too much of Grandma’s cooking” comas. It’s now time to get serious about some of these gifts, which can often mean a conversation with a call center agent.
At this time of year, it’s not uncommon for the call center to be wrought with heavy volumes, long wait times and dropped calls. It shouldn’t be this way as call center management knew the holidays would end and the calls would begin. So is this poor planning or did something break and the calls escalated all at once? If you have self-service channels in place and additional staff hired to handle the influx of callers, you’re on the right track to creating happy and loyal customers.
An experienced professional working in call center management, however, knows it is not quite that easy. Yes, it provides the baseline, but you have to be willing to do more to ensure smooth interactions for everyone during this peak time. One way to help manage the influx is to provide customers with additional channels of support. A recent Business2Community article suggested that you do the work to make sure your self-service channels are optimized so consumers are helped quickly and effectively.
This may mean you need to offer online FAQs so consumers can easily find answers to their questions without interacting with the call center. According to Forrester (News - Alert), 72 percent of consumers would prefer this method, especially if the list is relevant. The next step is to ensure chat and email are not only available, but also designed to deliver timely responses. Linking to self-help videos through all of these options can extend the self-service experience and provide customers with the information they need as often as they need it.
When live calls to need to take place, in addition to the management of the chat and email interactions, agents need to be on hand, trained and ready for any type of interaction. During the holiday rush is not the time to bring on the staff you need. Instead, recruit early and recruit often. Bring on quality individuals with plenty of time for extensive training. Look to internal staff to possibly fill these roles, and consider putting an on-call system in place for this peak time. If the on-call agent can work from home, he or she can quickly jump in to help without needing time to shower, dress and drive to the call center.
During this stressful time of year, it’s important that call center management remember to show appreciation for those staff members sticking it out to create the optimal experience for all customers. It’s a tough task, but one that should have many rewards at the end.
Edited by Maurice Nagle