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7 Ways to Handle Client-Work Efficiently This Christmas

7 Ways to Handle Client-Work Efficiently This Christmas

It’s important to find ways to handle client-work efficiently. Christmas is the biggest holiday season of the year, and therefore, it is the busiest time of the year. While people are going on vacations to celebrate the holidays, the pressure on businesses increases to serve the clients with limited staff efficiently. It is the real test of times one where the companies can also learn their strengths and weaknesses. However, just like everything else, the workload can be professionally and efficiently managed if you are prepared for it beforehand. So, if you want to make the most of this holiday season and handle client-work like a pro, keep reading!

The following are a few ways to help you efficiently manage holiday stress and pressure more efficiently and serve all the customers perfectly.

Understand Customer’s Point of View

Understand Customer’s Point of View

You must think from the customers’ point of view. It will be much easier to enhance customer support if you view your business from their point of view. Go through your business page/website in your free time and observe the point of view of the customer. You might find the issue that needs to be fixed or suggestions to improve the experience. You can even ask the customers straight away, mentioning that the holiday season can get crazy busy, so if there’s any change, they would like to address it, improving their experience. Not only will it give your insight, but it will also help you efficiently build a relationship of trust with the customers.

Provide a seamless experience

During the holiday season, the entire company must work together to provide a seamless experience to the customers. It does not mean that the accounts people start talking to customers; instead, every department must get on the QA duty. They could inform about the issues to the relevant department. For example, the marketing department can tell the customer support team about the problems or queries frequently shared on social media platforms. When the entire company works like a seamless machine, the holiday season will become a breeze to survive without upsetting or losing any customer. 

Consider outsourcing

Outsourcing staff in every company is a step which occurs mostly around the holiday time. No one hires in a rush because the cost of hiring an individual is relatively high. Therefore, there goes into a lot of consideration. However, even if you have your complete team ready, customer support staff will not be enough during Christmas when the customers bombard customer representatives with questions and complaints. Therefore, it is always wise to hire temporary staff by outsourcing for the holiday season to efficiently handle the workload.

Moreover, if any of the staff members are going on leave, the temporary staff will compensate for them. You can either get in touch with a recruitment company for hiring temporary staff or hiring customer support interns is always a good idea. The interns can deal with the minor issues while the trained staff can focus on the more critical issues.

Invest in a top-notch self service portal

The self service portal must be given extra attention and prepared before Christmas. There is an influx of customer queries and complaints during the holiday season. The staff get busy dealing with everything all at once. During that time, if the self-service portal is correctly updated and serves the purpose, it will minimize the load. Update the data on your self service portal blogs, links, FAQs, videos, testimonials, tutorials, etc. The customers can serve themselves whenever possible. Moreover, during the Christmas season, the staff is not available 24/7, so updating the timings will also help cut down a load of queries.

Professionally train the customer support staff.

Training is essential for every field of work. People helping others also need help. Make sure you regularly train the staff, especially for the increased workload. Update them about all the changes in the market and the industry, so they are well prepared to cater to customers and the different types of issues that they come with. Regular training also helps the staff open their minds and increase their skills and knowledge. Also, make sure that the team is well-aware of the famous philosophy that ‘customer is the king’. Therefore, they should deal with them accordingly.

Promise less and deliver on time

Huge promises and not deliver on time is a disappointment and ultimately puts off the client. Therefore, during the Christmas season, the smart thing to do is promise less than what you can deliver and then deliver more. It will keep the customers’ expectations in control. It will also give you the leverage to fulfill your promise without overburdening yourself. The holiday season is not the time to go above and beyond promises and commitments.

How to deal with difficult customer

Dealing with regular customers is one thing, and a customer with unreasonable demands is another thing. The staff should know how to deal with such customers and when is the right time to give in. Tekglide believes you must also train your staff to say ‘no’ to a customer when their demand is too unreasonable and beyond limits.

Prioritize customers with significant issues

Prioritize and keep everything organized. Make sure you prioritize customers who have genuine major issues over people with minor problems or something that can wait for after the holiday season. Therefore, focus on urgent queries first and then the regular ones. It will make the customers trust you and avoid controllable issues getting out of hand.

Prepare a solid plan for escalation

An escalation plan must always be in place for the team’s top work efficiently. So, before the madness of the holiday season begins, make sure that you have a solid escalation plan. The agents know to whom the issues must be forwarded when they cannot solve them. An escalation plan saves a lot of time. It helps the agents move forward with the queries instead of getting stuck at just one issue which is not getting solved or is not in their authority to solve.

Keep the support staff happy.

Last but not least, your support staff must be happy and satisfied with their workplace environment. A happy employee works ten times better than someone frustrated with the work and is not pleased to continue the job. Therefore, keeping the support staff team happy will only serve you for good.

Conclusion

Christmas time gets chaotic and hectic for businesses. Therefore, they must efficiently handle the influx of workload with fewer staff members. We have discussed some of the most essential points like how to consider outsourcing, on how to deal with difficult customers, keeping the support staff happy, deliver on time, self service portal etc which can help businesses stay on track and not upset any customer even during the busiest time of the year.