Three Great Ways to Ready the Contact Center for the Holidays

With the leftovers from Thanksgiving dinner now cooling in the refrigerator to await those late-night snackers and sandwich enthusiasts, and Black Friday (News - Alert) now a memory, the holiday shopping season has started in earnest and that has shoppers around the world considering gifts for family and friends, and maybe even themselves. We've been good all year, but how can a business make sure that its contact center won't be getting a lump of coal? There are three great ways to prepare a contact center for the buildup for this holiday season.

The first is an issue of preparation. Laying the groundwork well in advance of the holiday shopping season will help ensure the best possible result, and the one with the happiest customers rather than a bunch of Grinches stealing Christmas profits by taking their business elsewhere. An interactive voice response (IVR) system is a good start, as it allows many standard calls to be rapidly funneled to the most appropriate department to handle the issues in question. Don’t rely on the IVR to handle everything, however, and make sure that there's an option early on to allow users to connect to a live agent to ensure that the customers that don't have a simple problem can get it properly addressed. There's also an opportunity here to use telephony options like screen pops that connect to a customer relationship management (CRM) database to provide extra information about the customer during the call itself for a more personalized experience.

The second is also an issue of preparation: training temporary agents. Don't hire temporary agents at the last minute and expect them to gear themselves up; hire a little in advance to get them better acclimated and more in tune with the organization's needs. The better a temporary agent can perform, the better the results for both the incoming customers and for the organization as a whole.

Third is an issue more of operations than preparations. Something of a recent innovation in contact centers is the use of a callback during periods of extended hold times. Customers are offered the opportunity to have the contact center call them back after a certain period of time so that the customers can go do something else instead of sitting on the phone and waiting for an agent to handle their issues. Then the contact center can return the customer's call during less busy periods and handle an issue then, potentially with the option to allow the customer to schedule their own callback according to their specific needs.

With these three points in mind, the holiday shopping experience can be made better and more manageable for the customers. Improving the shopping experience commonly results in more being spent overall, not to mention the added potential bonuses of shoppers passing on solid word of mouth to friends and family about their positive experience, spurring them on to join in. There's a lot to lose, and plenty to gain, in the holiday shopping season, so getting the contact center ready for the job is vital to the overall success of the season.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO Miami 2013, Jan 29- Feb. 1 in Miami, Florida.  Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO (News - Alert). Follow us on Twitter.

Edited by Rachel Ramsey