Helping Hands
Cyber Monday might be the real deal or a deal breaker
In this article we show you how to prepare your customer service for seasonal peaks in customer inquiries, such as on Cyber Monday.
First we have Black Friday, and then Cyber Monday. These dates are very important for most B2C companies as they open the holiday season and mark the beginning of Holiday shopping. The high influx of customers can bring benefits, as they improve sales numbers, visibility and there is a high possibility of having a spike in new customers. However, with every great benefit, there are also big risks, and a lot of things can go wrong, such as:
- Longer waiting times for customers
- Downtime that might affect the sales
- Incorrect or outdated information
- Requests overwhelming the system
If you started your holiday season with a Black Friday mess, there are some steps you can take to make some improvements in your company, focusing especially on customer service processes. .
Let’s talk numbers
Here are three numbers that really show how big and important these dates are for your online shop, and why you being ready for them matters.
E-commerce traffic had 93.2 million buyers on Black Friday 2019. Mobile conversion rates increase by 40 percent on Black Friday and 50 percent on Cyber Monday. In 2019, the spending budget on Cyber Monday increased by 15% compared to the year before.
How to prepare for success?
With those numbers in mind and a goal in sales, you might ask yourself how your company can prepare for success for the following holidays. We have a couple tips that might help you and your customer service team get the most benefits and avoid a lot of the risks that come with this season.
Scale up: a piece of customer satisfaction
The big focus of these dates is the high volume of customers coming in, not only to the physical stores, but in the online store as well. This means that you must stack up your inventory as well as your resources for customer service.
How to prepare for seasonal traffic spikes?
Let’s tackle the main issue: seasonal spikes in traffic.
There is plenty of room for improvement for your online store, that will not only make your job easier, but will also improve the overall customer satisfaction.
Remember that responding time is crucial for customers when it comes to making a purchase, especially when trying to answer their questions or concerns with a product or shipping times, for example. One thing that will help you with this is to get better servers, and to test them beforehand. However, this alone is not enough and the next step is thinking about troubleshooting for customers. Make sure that they will not only get their products on time but also an answer to their questions or a resolution to their requests when they need it.
Do NOT forget Customer Service Resources
Customer Service might be the last thing you think about when planning for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but remember that at least for the next month there is going to be a constant input of new information about the sales and a lot of people might need help resolving issues such as payment, shipment and so on.
These new spikes in traffic can mean higher sales but they can also mean more bad reviews. From the end of November to Christmas Eve people are going to be looking for products and services to give their loved ones, and bad reviews about customer service are going to be an issue when it comes to trusting your store. This will not only leave you with a lower customer rating, but it will also haunt you past the season if those issues seem to continue, which will also jeopardize your future sales. If you want a deeper insight about customer reviews and how to improve them, you can find our masterclass here :)
Not every customer communicates the same
To scale up on customer service resources you can take a couple of preventive steps. The first one is to make as many communication channels as possible available to your customers, so they can reach you through their preferred method. This might sound like you have to spend more time and resources, but with the right system you will have a more efficient customer service.
Additionally, if you are thinking about having more and better trained agents to take on those communication channels, this should be done early on as the hiring, training and qualification processes take a long time, and they need to be ready for the holiday season. That’s why we also advise companies to automate customer services channels when possible, as it will not only help you out if the holiday season catches you off guard, but will also improve the efficiency of request processing.
Which channels can you automate with OMQ?
As we just suggested, automation can cover a lot of the bases when it comes to customer service. However, this might be time sensitive if you are thinking of hiring automation for the holidays that just arrived. You might think that this season, you will also suffer the consequences of being underprepared, but not all hope is lost if you hire the right company: OMQ.
Our OMQ team wants you to improve on your customer service, so that you can surprise your loyal customers with a more efficient support for this season, and win new customers that will last for a long time. Our AI-based software will be able to handle a lot more requests than human agents and can automatically answer requests. These are the processes you can improve with our product range.
Help page
When it comes to the holiday season, a lot of information is going to be constantly changing, from shipping dates, pricing, and even gift options. You customers most likely know that these changes and updates are happening, but they find it difficult to keep up, and constantly look for the same questions over and over again. To improve and optimize your help page you can have a self-completing search bar that will not only show the questions asked, but will also track the trends, displaying in real time the most frequently asked requests, and making it easier for those with same questions to find an answer and avoiding any further customer service escalation. Having a clear, updated and categorized help page can make a world of a difference in customer satisfaction and you can achieve all of this with OMQ Help.
Contact Form
Another great issue that people have when shopping online is the contact form. They have a question or need an issue solved and yet the contact form feels more like a police questionnaire than an actual customer service form. To avoid this, you should keep it simple and just ask for basic information in addition to the question itself. However, if you want to take it even further and go the extra mile for your customers, you can have answers to the question they are asking automatically pop-up on the side, even before sending the request, with OMQ Contact. This will not only reduce waiting time for your customer but it will also save you and your team some effort.
Ticketsystem
You might find that even with your biggest efforts, your ticket system is still overwhelmed and there is a lot of backlog. With holiday shopping this will only get worse and there is a risk that a lot of your customers will not be able to get answers to their questions and be dissatisfied with your service. OMQ Assist gives you a hand, and helps your agents with ticket handling by automatically suggesting answers to the questions in the ticketing system, where they just need to choose and click the most fitting one and the software will compose a replying message with the answers. This saves time, assures the information will be updated, as the agents won’t have to answer it from the top of their head and make the process more efficient.
Some customers will be more daring this season and try shopping online for the first time, and when they have a question they will most likely choose the closest method that resembles a letter, therefore making your inbox resemble a ticket system. This will put you at risk of having a big backlog and even making some customers’ emails bounce because of the amount of unopened messages. OMQ Reply opens and answers all those emails automatically, making it effortless for your and your team, and giving the customer a timely and accurate response.
Chatbot
Having real-time answers for our inquiries has become a rule over the past few years and a lot of consumers really like and appreciate it when the company is able to accommodate them with a channel that will provide these instant answers. The favorite method is chat, and with OMQ Chatbot you can have interactive dialogues that mimic live-chats with your customers while being reachable 24/7 and solving their requests in real time. Our Chatbot works for platforms like Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, and website chats.
Further features of the OMQ system
Our whole product range uses one knowledge base, that distributes the information on all channels, making it possible to update information just once, and be sure it is available for all of your customers, not just a few ones.
Their implementation is fast and hassle free. All of our products are also:
- Is user-friendly
- Offer brand customization
- Work out of the box
If you want to give a present to your company, why not give one that will make everything better? Do not hesitate to contact us, if you want to know more about our system or if you want a demo. :)
