The holidays can be a stressful time of the year, but they are also a great opportunity to stand out from the competition and solidify your customer base. Use that opportunity and make the right first impression with your customers.
After all, 56% of shoppers choose a different shopping experience from last year’s Christmas period due to past experiences. The following tips will ensure that your customers don’t fall into that statistic and that they keep coming back to your eCommerce store time and time again.
Top Tips for Providing Best Customer Service During Holiday Season
- Have a Clear FAQ Page on Your Site
- Add a Live Chat to Your Site
- Train Your Customer Service Team
- Prioritize Urgent Customer Requests
- Evaluate Your Work
1. Have a Clear FAQ Page on Your Site
If you use a help desk or call center software, you can easily discover the recurring questions that your customers have for you. Analyze the inquiries you receive from your shoppers and identify the questions your customers ask most frequently. Those are the questions that you add to your FAQ page.
They might include shipping time, returns policy, refund policy, and payment options.
As the holidays roll around, consider updating your FAQ page to include any new popular questions. Those may concern the exclusive holiday deals that you offer as a part of your holiday marketing campaign.
POWR’s FAQ app will help you achieve all of that. It reduces support requests and converts better by displaying answers to common questions right on your site.
With this app, customers won’t have to go through the trouble of contacting you as you’ll be offering standardized responses to their recurring questions.
2. Add a Live Chat to Your Site
You can further prepare for questions by adding a live chat to your site. It enables your customers to communicate with you directly and resolve their issues quickly.
What’s more, you can also automate your customer support with chatbots to deliver instant answers to customers’ queries 24/7. Please see this article for tips on how to handle customer complaints with chatbots.
POWR’s Facebook Chat is another app that might reduce the workload for your service team. It receives chats from customers straight from your website and sends you notifications about incoming messages on your phone.
That way, you’re aware of every inquiry you receive and can provide the assistance needed to reduce potential roadblocks to purchases.
3. Train Your Customer Service Team
Customers get extra impatient during the holidays as they expect quick service and problem resolution. Prepare for the influx of queries by offering special training to your service team.
The training can be in different forms, including video-based training, webinars, and so on. But online coaching is one of the most effective training methods you can use to train your staff and achieve great results together.
If it’s just you handling the support tickets, create an internal knowledge base that hosts detailed FAQs. Using said knowledge base, you’ll be able to pull the right information for your customers faster.
Other good practices to consider in dealing with any kind of shoppers are practicing active listening and communicating in a positive tone. That will not only present your business in a friendly light but also relieve some of the stress and anxiety you might be feeling during the festive rush.
Although better executive communication skills and active listening take time and patience, their upside is that they go hand-to-hand with other soft skills such as empathy, tolerance, open-mindedness, positivity, and more.
According to Novorésumé, active listening is what makes or breaks a conversation, so training your staff to be active listeners is never a waste.
In addition to creating a comprehensive FAQ page and training your customer service team, consider diversifying your support tools by incorporating educational resources such as online language learning platforms.
For instance, offering materials on German learning could be an invaluable asset for customers aiming to expand their international eCommerce dealings or simply looking to add a personal touch in customer communication during the holiday season.
Lingoda provides native-level German instruction tailored for everyday situations, making it easier than ever for your team or your customers themselves to bridge linguistic gaps and foster better relationships.
4. Prioritize Urgent Customer Requests
Keep your customers happy by responding to the most pressing issues first.
To correctly identify them, ask yourself if the issue is being experienced simultaneously by multiple customers or if the request must be addressed as soon as possible.
For example, a customer complaint about a defective product calls for an answer more than an inquiry about future product updates. You may use a tool like a HelpDesk or Zendesk to set the priority of every query as “High, Medium, or Low”. Then you’ll know exactly what issues to focus your attention on.
Once you know which tasks to prioritize, you can plan your day more efficiently and provide the best customer experience.
5. Evaluate Your Work
Though it might feel like a separate task, taking time to record your findings during the holiday rush will save you time and headaches next year.
Once the season is over, sit down and evaluate your customer service performance. What did end up being unnecessary? What documentation needs updating? How often did we receive specific requests?
To organize your thoughts, keep a Google sheet where you record this information, go over all the data collected and use that data to think of ways to improve for the next holiday season.
Another way to evaluate your performance is by looking at the actual revenue generated as a result of your customer service efforts and comparing them against revenue generated in earlier years.
That will give you an idea of what works and what doesn’t and what you need to change in your customer service strategy to make more sales going forward.
In Closing
With these tips in mind, you’ll be ready to tackle the high volume of customer tickets head-on.
Remember to have an FAQ and chat in place on your website, prioritize urgent customer requests, and evaluate your work once the season is over to successfully navigate the holiday rush, boost conversions, and ensure a great customer experience.
