The holiday season is a stressful time of year for everyone – shoppers, retailers, service providers and especially those in customer support. Emotions are high and people simply want a smooth holiday shopping experience. With all the chaos, the last thing you want is your quality of customer service to decline during the holiday rush. You can empower your team to provide superior customer service with these 4 tactics to providing delightful customer support during the holiday rush:

Standardized Service Processes

When you provide a process for your team to efficiently and effectively handle all your customer interactions, you are amping them up for success. Having a set way to tackle situations, keeps an agent productive and their stress levels down because they know how to properly address the situation. These plans also help you divide and conquer your inquiry load by having the right cases assigned to the right individual or team right away. Based on the urgency and type of help needed, you’re getting the proper help for the customer the first time. This leads to less handling of the customer around to different departments and a better customer experience.

Publish Your Frequently Asked Questions

Reduce your amount of customer inquiries by providing your customers with resources they need to solve their own problems. According to Forrester, 72% of customers prefer self-service to resolve their support issues over picking up the phone or sending an email. Your business can create this database of frequently asked questions to be promoted on your website, blog, phone app, or social media channels. This is an incredible resource to your customers, and your staff. Consider some of the following questions for your holiday FAQ:

1. What are your hours over the holiday?
2. Did you recently release a new product just in time for the holidays? What makes it special? Any product description?
3. Are there any discount codes available? Explain the fine print.
4. What are your shipping policies?
5. What are your return/exchange/cancellation policies?
6. Do you have any rush order options?

Schedule Additional Support Training

Give your customer service team all the resources they need to be successful this holiday season. An effective way to do that is to conduct training sessions. These sessions can include topics such as solving customer’s problems quickly during the holiday rush, and creating a positive experience for those who are feeling the holiday stress. They can also include more detailed information on holiday specials or newly released products or services that may cause customers to have more questions than usual. If the time allows, it may be beneficial to look back at previous years’ customer support records. Based on common holiday complaints, training exercises can be created to give support agents experience handling those specific situations. Overall, this continued training employers your agents to efficiently handle problems without having to call over their supervisor at every step or client escalation.

Delegate Social Media Responsibilities

If you don’t already have someone on staff to monitor and manage your social media accounts, assign a colleague to jump-in during the holidays. When consumers have a problem with their order or aren’t replied to right away, they could be quick to talk about it on social media. With the holidays, your business can anticipate more inquiries on social media. You don’t want your Twitter feed or Facebook comments to be full of “Where’s my order”?, “What about my shipping?”, or “Why haven’t you responded to me??”. That person assigned to social media is responsible for responding to those inquiries in a timely and positive manner. 

Is your business feeling the stress of the holiday rush? How do you keep your customers calm during this chaotic time? Share your support strategies in the comments below!