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Is your customer support team prepared for the holiday season?
Businesses and retailers are adopting an online commerce system as the pandemic continues to ravage the world well into the end of the year. With increased sales, the need for better support is significant.
Infrastructural strength, industry-leading uptime, and third-party integrations are all required to prepare for this. Let’s begin by discussing why you should focus on delivering excellent customer service during holidays.
Exceptional customer service is the one true defining factor for a business to succeed in 2021. A better customer experience ensures a better brand perception. Is it necessary to increase your customer support function during the holiday season? Here’s why.
During these weeks, more conversations about your brand are likely to occur among your customers and your target audience. Websites see 63% more traffic on their websites during the holiday season. Customers can make or break your deal at this moment, and how you treat them will distinguish you from the rest. A lot of people talking creates a lot of noise in the market, so use customer support as a weapon to create a good impression.
During the holiday period, consumers’ ‘Willingness to Pay’ is the highest price they are willing to pay for a product or service. Behavioral economics defines this as the maximum cost a consumer is willing to pay. During festivities, people are more likely to spend or invest than at any other time. Your holiday season support will increase your conversion pool if you provide it.
Because of COVID-19, eCommerce has increased exponentially. During the pandemic, more people shopped online than ever before. Safety as well as convenience has prompted this rise, as more and more physical stores are opening and welcoming people.
As more consumers spend more time cooped up in their homes, they also spend more time online. This has resulted in an increase in time spent on mobiles and in conversational apps, meaning that social commerce will play a huge role in converting holiday shoppers across every stage of their buyer journey.
Per a recent Salesforce study, 37% of U.S. adults are more interested in mobile app shopping than last year, and 22% feel the same about social commerce.
Holiday shopping also brings with it an increase in sales which also means an increase in call volume, enquiring about product details, shipping and return policies, payments, complaints and so on.
Failing to deliver quality support not only reduces short term sales but also impacts long term trust in your brand.
At 74.5% — customer service is the second most-pressing holiday eCommerce concern among large online businesses.
Support Chatbot
The volume of traffic during the holiday season is impressive. Customers are bombarded with deals in addition to having a higher than usual purchase desire during the holidays. Support teams can’t keep up with the demand for traditional channels such as email and phone support. Accordingly, providing your support team with the most effective tools is critical to your holiday sales strategy. A critical component of your holiday sales strategy is whether your support team delivers a positive experience for 10% of your clients. If your marketing campaign can be advertised in each of your support emails, it will increase your repeat purchase rate by 30%. Every support email has a nearly 100% open rate.
You can rely on your business’ support service, which includes state-of-the-art software and a dedicated support team. Now, you must handle your clients. During the holidays, you may be faced with a range of unfamiliar issues and queries from customers. Be prepared to answer any queries, and make information accessible. Even if something goes wrong, a terrific holiday season support experience can generate a faithful customer as we discussed previously. Because of this, you should have a dedicated phone, e-mail, chat, and social media support team, and you should answer all requests within 24 hours.
Adding updated contact information to your website and all order confirmations can encourage a customer’s trust in your store. The easier it is for them to reach out, the less likely they are going to fall through this process. Other helpful info such as an FAQ page with quick and easy answers will also build trust with new customers. 53% of online adults are prone to abandoning their online purchases if they can’t quickly find an answer to their question. Combining this personal touch with Artificial Intelligence (AI), which surfaces relevant information at scale 24/7 so that you’re always reaching out without having to worry about expensive overhead costs, creates a very fulfilling experience for both the buyer and seller.
Channel-first, not brand first. You can’t expect your shoppers to choose your channel of communication for any questions they might have. This means that you need an all-encompassing omnichannel strategy so that consumers feel like they’re getting answers no matter what mode of contact they use. They might be browsing through your website and find a product they’re looking for but later hop on Instagram to buy it – how seamless is this cross-channel journey in your business? And people often look up support using several platforms across the web – social media accounts, websites or apps. When things happen too fast like this, you may want to rely on a chatbot operating within these channels who’ll always be able to answer at any given second along their buyer’s journey.
Feedback is the most important touchpoint you have with your customers. Well collected feedback can help you understand which new offerings are performing well and what regular practices aren’t working anymore. How was your experience today? is a simple question that means so much more than it might seem to – because it brings both positive reviews and ways for improvement to your business. Add CSAT questionnaires at the end of all channels of communication and offer incentives to those who leave a review– such as a one-time coupon, referral rewards program, or free shipping discounts.
You’ve gathered important feedback and now you have supporting data. Gather the same from other verticals and start to create an overview by which you can adjust your efforts accordingly. If customers are engaging more with certain ads, increase them. Say a majority of your site traffic comes from a single source, continue those efforts while making plans for increasing traffic from other channels. If one support tool is producing faster results with higher satisfaction rates, move customers to it while scaling down poor-performing systems. Look at the articles that got the most hits during past festive seasons. Are they around pricing, shipping, inventory or returns? Put those items first on your list when creating new products or improvements in order to garner more trust among potential buyers. Moving quickly is necessary but beware of last minute changes or fixes; these could result in significant downtime, so consider freezing any code before heading into holiday season festivities.
Unsurprisingly, when there are issues with your service, your live agents and customer support team will be overburdened with floods of incoming requests. It’s a colossal task to individually attend to each request – it requires too much time and energy. Deploying a customer support system like conversational AI empowers those who answer the phone and chat windows (if you don’t want or need anything automated) by doing some of the less critical tasks for them so they can work at their optimum capacity without worrying about manual tasks which can bog them down. A robust conversational AI chatbot is equipped with features that assist this team in bringing chats from start to finish effortlessly. Let’s look at a few examples.
Canned responses for quick replies.
Holiday seasons usually spike up customer service queries by up to 75% for online businesses. This is when your support team can use some help to ensure the busiest weeks of the year go by effortlessly – a conversational AI support chatbot. Most businesses are doing it. You, too, can streamline and scale your customer support this holiday season too. Ensure a cheerful holiday experience for both your customers and agents with an autonomous customer support chatbot.
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