Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Are Your Agents Prepared to Succeed This Holiday Season?
It should be pretty clear to everyone that the holiday shopping season is in full swing. Black Friday (News - Alert) and its cousins such as Small Business Saturday may have passed, but the rush to buy the hottest gifts this year will not cease until the final days of December.
What businesses need to concern themselves with this year is how to prepare their customer service agents for success. With the increase in shopping for the holiday season, the demand for high-quality customer service will reach one of the highest points of the year. Simply the increase in customer support calls will place a heavier burden on call centers; in addition, agents will need to be prepared to give information about more products and services that they may see at any other time.
A recent blog post at Business2Community points out that there are some basic steps that managers can take to get their staff ready for all comers. Overall business preparation, agent training, and empathy for customer concerns will be the orders of the (holi)day.
First, the preparation of business operations can take the form of business process analysis. Managers can dig deep to find out if there are any extra, unnecessary steps customers need to make to speak to agents – these numbers of steps can be shortened perhaps in automated voice response systems or in call queuing software. Managers can also take lessons from analytics that show, for instance, the 2014 holiday rush and its uptick in concerns about product returns. That information can make its way to agents, who will need to be ready to provide customers with company return policies.
Although agents may have received initial training for their positions and periodic training as supplements, special holiday training can allow them to review the specific hardships they will encounter in the rush. They can pick up reminders about how to complete actions such as call transfers, which may be helpful when customers end up speaking to agents who represent incorrect departments. Automated call queuing software should reduce those types of situations, but more customers overall will translate to more uncommon situations.
Finally there is the need for empathy. Hectic times call for an increase in understanding, so part of that training could emphasize a push for kind words and patience. Even though agents will feel the need to rush through calls just to attend to every customer, that need should not replace a kind word or positive attitude that can make a customer’s day bright. Callers may not enter their calls thinking that customer service agents can handle the strain, so surprising them with excellent effort can go a long way toward making holiday sales and 2016 sales all the brighter.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi