You’ve done all the prep and you’re ready for the holiday rush. But smart companies know the work doesn’t stop there. The holiday season represents a perfect laboratory for examining your business, as well as your performance at each point of customer contact. Why? Because it’s basically your day-to-day business activities on max speed. So you had 72 percent first-call resolution rates in August. Great. What about the day after Christmas?
This is the second of our two-part holiday help desk series. In part one, we revealed four last-minute checklist items to ensure an even smoother holiday season for your help desk and contact center. This post is all about how companies can use the holiday season to essentially stress test their help desk and support center. This helps identify high performing areas, as well as those that need to be improved upon in the new year. Here are the five suggested areas companies should examine during the holiday season:
Employee onboarding – To deal with the increase in volume over the holidays, many companies will add seasonal employees to their help desk and support teams. These employees must be trained on the help desk system, but at a much more rapid pace than that of a full-time employee. Companies should use this opportunity to examine the success of their training techniques, as well as the usability of their system. On average, how long does it take to train a seasonal employee? How much assistance is required when getting familiar with the help desk system? Post-training, are operations smooth, or do you experience several interruptions due to employee questions and general misunderstandings? This knowledge can be used to help improve both seasonal and full-time training and onboarding going forward.
Internal collaboration – You have spent the last nine months preparing for the holidays. You have anticipated everything and you know what steps to take to solve whatever problems may arise. Mitch Lieberman, VP of Marketing at Sword Ciboodle, calls this the coordination period. But during the holiday rush, it’s all about collaboration. “Collaboration is when something is outside what could or should have been easily coordinated,” says Lieberman. “Are you ready to collaborate on these emergency issues that you didn’t predict?” The holidays are a great time to monitor how your departments collaborate and problem solve during what is likely to be a stressful time.
Peak load management – The most expensive part of customer service is the people. Bringing on seasonal employees during peak load times, like the holidays, is a cost-effective way to manage the higher volume of inquiries. Ideally, the seasonal employees will only be trained on those 20+ FAQ’s you came up with in preparation for the holidays (discussed in Part 1), saving the hard stuff for the more experienced and higher-paid full-time staff. Measuring the percentage of first-call resolutions compared to the percent of calls escalated will help to inform your peak load strategy. It can also save you money. “If you can figure out how to best distribute the work load between temporary versus full-time employees, you can experience a huge amount of savings and also provide a better customer experience,” says Assistly’s Senior VP of Marketing, Matt Trifiro.
Emergency response processes – Assume something bad is going to happen. It’s not pessimism. It’s good business. If you assume disaster will strike, you will have an emergency response system in place that’s ready to manage the disaster on all channels. Here’s an example: The iPhone is an item on your website, but instead of being listed for $399, it’s listed for $39.99. Phones will ring, emails will flood in, Twitter and Facebook will be ablaze with comments. What’s your plan for communicating with your customers when an issue is identified? How effective is that plan? Having proactive procedures mapped out for unforeseen emergencies will not prevent call spikes, but it can lower the spikes to a manageable amount.
Customer satisfaction – Measuring customer satisfaction is something that companies should be doing all year long. But it is especially important during the holidays. You might have great satisfaction rates during low-volume times of year, but is your support team still on par when things get hectic? After the hustle and bustle of the holiday season has passed, Trifiro suggests reaching out to a subset of your customers to ask, “How’d we do?” This feedback basically serves as crowdsourced analysis of your help desk and support center operation. Additionally, it is arguably more valuable than charts and graphs that monitor performance because it’s coming from the mouths of your most important critics.
By observing and monitoring these areas during your busiest time of year, you will be able to identify both the strongest and weakest parts of your help desk and support center operation. Then, going into the new year, you can adjust operations accordingly for improved performance.
Does your company already do this sort of stress testing? What areas do you think are most important for businesses to monitor over the holidays? Please let us know in the comment section below.
