With seven weeks to go until Christmas, you can bet that today is a great time to begin injecting your customer service with some holiday cheer. As you can imagine, people are getting pretty excited about the forthcoming holiday season.
Here are three ways to step up your customer service during the holidays:
1. Provide holiday callers with the option to skip the queue.
Waiting is no fun. But, during the always-busy holiday shopping season, that’s what a lot of consumers are forced to do. They’re forced to wait in long line ups in stores to pay for their purchases and they’re also forced to wait on hold when calling companies for customer service. Why not give the glorious gift of ‘not having to wait’ this holiday season? Offer holiday callers the opportunities to receive call backs when your agents become free.
“During the holidays, time is of the essence,” writes Shauna Geraghty on TalkDesk.com, “Make sure your team takes this into consideration and configures your call center software so that it gives the gift of time to callers. Allow your callers to request a callback from the waiting queue or to be transferred straight to voicemail so they can make every holiday minute count.”
2. Deliver news about your holiday hours in your outgoing messages.
During what days will your business be closed this holiday season? Will you be extending your shopping hours? The answers to both of these questions should be found in your outgoing messages. Remember that many holiday shoppers have to do their shopping when they’re finished work. Stores that open later benefit from the fact that for many shoppers, “the later, the better” is the name of the game.
“The holidays usually mean crazy hours,” notes Ryan Alleman on Jive.com, “In the lead-up, many businesses extend their hours to accommodate shoppers. Others cut their hours short because so many people are headed out on vacation. Before any of these issue hits you, map out what level of service you want to offer and what hours you want to keep over the holidays.”
3. Use call forwarding when you’re on vacation.
“Part of setting up your schedule in your phone system is determining where you want to forward your existing extensions over the holiday break,” says Alleman, “You don’t want callers to sit waiting while one of your phones rings in an empty office. A hosted VoIP phone system makes this part a snap.”
One of the greatest aspects of MeloTel’s Commercial Phone Services is that it enables you to conduct business using your business telephone number from just about any place in the world where an internet connection is available. Especially with a feature like Single Number Reach, being away from the office doesn’t mean disappointing your most important clients.
The amazing service allows you to forward your number to up to five different devices that will all ring simultaneously when the numbers is called! For more information, please don’t hesitate to contact us at 1-888-MELOTEL or use the Live Chat feature on our website!
