How to Offer Your Contact Center's Best During Peak Season
- The biggest challenge for contact center managers is planning for and adapting to seasonal and other spikes in customer inquiries.
- About 70% of businesses believe that forecasting for seasonal spikes is unreliable, resulting in poor customer experience.
- Meeting customer demand means breaking the hiring and firing routine and examining culture, technology, and analytics for answers.
Adorn the office with decorations. Take the decorations down. Wrap presents for the staff. Unwrap presents from the staff. Accelerate campaigning, so budget is used. Decelerate spending, so the budget lasts the year. Each year, businesses go through the same cyclical routines of putting activities in motion for the upcoming holiday season and then undoing those activities once the season has passed.
For businesses immersed in retail sales, travel planning, customer service, and other industries, the put-up, take-down routines are all too familiar. Oftentimes, these yearly occurrences pertain to augmenting full-time contact center associates with seasonal help to meet the flood of consumer inquiries that happen from Black Friday through New Year’s Day.
Adapt to Spikes to Survive the Holidays
One of the biggest challenges for contact center managers is planning for and adapting to spikes in customer inquiries. In its 2018 Call Center Industry Report, Liveops, a supplier of call center agents, affirmed this pain point. More than 50% of their survey respondents said they suffered from demand fluctuations due to seasonal and unplanned events.
In this age of big data, it would seem that contact center leaders should predict seasonal spikes with confidence, but the Liveops survey respondents indicate otherwise. Results show that about 70% of businesses believe that forecasting for agent-drowning events is unreliable. This means that during spikes, it’s likely that customers will linger on hold for longer than acceptable periods—about a minute according to Velaro, a live-chat software company.
How precarious is this situation? According to data shared by Statista, in 2017 54% of customers in the United States stopped doing business with a company due to poor customer service. That’s a five percentage point increase over the prior year, showing that we’re becoming even pickier about the service we receive. Knowing this, the holiday season can mean real trouble if you’re a company that’s infamous for long hold times.
[Read our industry brief: Stop Hiring for Peak Season]
Three Ways to Stop the Cycle
You’ve invested time and resources into your contact center agents, making them a valuable resource for your organization. However, good agents are finite. So many companies take to augmenting their efforts with temporary help during the busiest times. While this seems like a good idea, hiring and firing agents each year can fatigue even intrepid managers and can cost thousands per agent. Getting around this repetitive process means considering a few changes:
Build a better culture. Allowing under-performing agents, or those not yet immersed in your culture, to work alongside seasoned staff can be detrimental. Developing the right talent is critical to company culture and finances. The average cost of losing a good employee is nearly $30,000 according to CareerBuilder. Making sure that you keep your good talent working with peers of the same caliber is critical. If you’re going to use seasonal agents, make sure that they’re well trained and consider grooming them to replace agents that may leave (for whatever reason) the following year. Not doing this could mean you risk losing a good agent as well as disappointing your customers.
Get some new tech or at least update what you have. Technology, if used properly, can be a great equalizer for call center managers’ war against seasonal spikes. Creating the next gen of customer experiences means considering the use of things like chatbots or artificial intelligence. These tools can get customers directed to the agent most capable of helping them more quickly (lowering average time to resolution) or, perhaps even better, enabling customers to help themselves.
If new tech gives you pause, consider updating have in what you already have in place. Re-examine your website FAQs or check to see if there’re tweaks you can make to your interactive voice response system that will create better customer experiences.
Inspect what you expect. Monitoring and reporting on agent activities, business outcomes, and customer experiences are essential to any contact center. Real-time data and analytics enable a manager to address performance issues before they impact customer experiences. Chances are you’re already gathering some of this data, but due to siloing, you're not able to use it effectively. You may not be able to see exactly how it relates to the entire omnichannel service environment. Contact center analytics can ensure that you understand performance and that you’re creating the type of customer interactions you expect.
Seasonal spikes in contact center activity are a reality for many industries. Being caught short, unable to meet the demands and expectations of your customers, doesn’t have to be.
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