How to Handle Rush during Holidays in Your Call Center?

Christmas bells have already started ringing. There are some businesses in which the holidays will get started. On the other hand, in some industries, the workload will be increased. The call center is one of the industry verticals which face increased workload during the holiday season.

Christmas and holiday season actually increase work and stress levels on agents and managers, both. If you are leading a call center, here are some easy to follow tips to handle the holiday rush without increasing stress:

1. Know insights about the holiday rush

If you are using a call center solution, dig deeper to see the reports of last year’s holiday season. You need to see which products were in demand, what services were making differences, what types of queries appeared repetitively? Your reports and filters in the call center software will provide all these details.

These details will help you define the areas to be improved. You can design IVR to answer frequently asked questions. You can train your team to take care of the concerns that come up repetitively.

2. Add more agents in the call center

You care to hire remote agents or on-premises agents based on your employment model and labor laws. It is necessary to add more agents during the holiday season as it is the peak season and you need to handle the holiday rush.

Make sure to hire experienced agents instead of recruiting fresher who may not have the required experience of dealing with customers within the minimum time to maintain a good FCR (First Call Resolution) ratio.

3. Use omnichannel call center software

Generally, call centers use a call center solution that supports voice calling operations. However, to handle the holiday rush effectively, you need to use an omnichannel call center software. An omnichannel call center solution uses different communication channels such as voice calls, video calls, screen share, instant messaging, SMS, fax, etc.

There are many benefits of using an omnichannel call center solution during the holiday season. For example, the load on agents could be distributed when you have voice calls and chat to offer. In this case, some customers will stay in the voice call queue and some will take benefit of real-time chat to get answers to their queries.

Also, sending an email or SMS is mandatory in some campaigns which provide further information. Thus, make sure to use an omnichannel call center solution.

4. Add social media channels in your call center solution

Social media platforms are one of the channels on which customers connect with brands. They share their frustration and appreciation on different social media channels. Thus, you have to integrate the major social media platform as per your business model with the call center software. It will help in improving customer satisfaction.

These are the top 4 tips you can follow to increase customer satisfaction. This can help you handle the holiday rush and that also gracefully.

We offer omnichannel call center software. Contact us for more details.