3 Tips For Managing Seasonal Peaks

I recently joined Call Centre Helper to talk about how to manage seasonal peaks - all businesses experience fluctuations in demand - here are three tips to prepare you for when the tide hits.

Let's start with 'Pandemic Paralysis'

Over the last 18 months, many organisations have been negatively impacted by the pandemic, lots severely so.

Even today, as our nations are in the midst of rebuilding, businesses are still impacted. We hear of supply chain shortages, shipping delays and changing customer behaviours making business decisions harder to judge and pandemic created paralysis still a thing.

BUT, and this may be a controversial view, the one area in which we, customers, shouldn't be feeling such pain, is within customer service.

We shouldn't be hearing IVR messages or seeing virtual chat responses to the effect of "Due to the pandemic, we are experiencing longer delays than usual".

Organisations are experiencing reduced employee satisfaction, trust and engagement due to the effects of furlough and remote working changes but the capacity to meet the demand of your customers needs to be smartly managed and it’s time to reinvigorate your workforce, any lingering impact of the pandemic should not be used as a fallback excuse for a less than good enough customer experience.

Let me give you a personal and very painful example. I've just returned from my honeymoon, we stayed at a Barbados Sandles Royal resort, a brand we haven't stayed with before but that we intrinsically trusted due to its outstanding reputation. The venue was lovely, the location beautiful, the sun hot and the cocktails delicious. All of that was overcast by the fact the hotel was full (Barbados was one of the few long-haul destinations on the green list at the time) and the staff were at reduced capacity, this resulted in terrible customer service and overall a very disappointing experience. Their initial and informal response was that they are still finding their feet after the pandemic, and we are in it together so there is a strong degree of empathy, but just as we expect a customer to pay to be our customer, customers are expecting to receive a service for that payment - and not a sub-par one.

Next up, beating your customers.

Nope, I'm not talking about physically attacking your customers (unless you are working in a very niche area - and if you are, I’m all ears!). I'm talking about navigating increased demand by utilising data to pre-empt your customer's next move and preparing for it.

Let me make that tangible by giving you a few examples of how you can do that.

Let's say you're running a special seasonal promotion on a new product or service. It's likely that despite the cleverly planned communications you share with customers, they will still have questions. Journey map this new promotion, step into your customer's shoes and try and address these before they even formulate as a question. Also, make sure your knowledge base, FAQ or chatbot is updated with the answers to these questions so that those who can or choose to self serve, get what they need on their first attempt and don't have the need to make contact.

Another example, let's say you're a service or utility supplier and you expect a peak in demand over a particular issue that's common at this time of the year. Why not train a dedicated team or group of agents to direct customers who are facing this issue to? This way you can update your contact information with this dedicated service, customers know exactly whom to contact and how, customers get an expert and efficient service and the general population of front-line agents are freed up to handle BAU.

Beating your customers to meet their needs before they even recognise it as a need is a great way to offer a pro-active and effective customer experience, (whilst freeing up your capacity) but you can only do this with a good understanding of both your business and your customers, so make good use of the data you hold and design your service peek management around what you know.

Above all else, empower your front line frontiers.

If you do experience seasonal peaks and for whatever reason, don't quite manage those as effectively as you intended - nothing can soothe an irked customer better than a truly wonderful agent who is simply brilliant at making the customer feel cared for. On the flip side, there's no better way to provoke a customers amygdala into irrational fury than a lack-lustre, ineffective voice on the other end of the line.

So make sure you are prepared for seasonal spikes by hiring great people, make sure your recruitment process considers new hires who champion customer experience, who display empathetic characteristics... and it helps if they want to be there.

Once you have the right people - equip them. Train your people so they are educated and prepared in how to manage the expected and unexpected, and give them the tools they need to be able to do a great job. A crappy, hard to navigate CRM with a million pages on screen is not conducive to a happy agent or good subsequently, a good customer experience.

And then right as I said at the beginning of this slide, empower them. I truly love talking about CX recovery and that's what we are talking about here, if you haven't been able to meet demand and you do have a frustrated customer, here is your opportunity to salvage the experience and turn a negative experience into a positively remembered one. But you can only do that with a team who are trusted and empowered to do what's right for the customer, to think outside of the box and not be inhibited by process - create that frontline frontier to be your fail-safe if you need it.