7 Tactics to Ensure Great Customer Service during Peak Season

Peak or holiday seasons like Christmas or New Year, are most important seasons for e-retailers from sales and revenue point of view. During these periods, e-retailers plan to earn big money and attract new customers by offering good discounts and schemes. On the other hand, even customers sail high on expectations’.

It all sounds great until you find yourself inundated with customer support emails, non-stop phone calls, live chat messages that can be exciting for you as it means more customers but can be very stressful for your customer support staff.  Long working hours and handling innumerable customers’ queries take a toll on employees’ health. On the other hand, inadequate responses accompanied by long waiting time infuriate customers to a great extent. So, during peak holiday seasons, businesses face dual challenges of satisfying customers and keeping employees motivated

Thus, it is vital for business to take pro-active actions for maintaining festive spirit of the customers and offering them great customer experiences. Below are the few ways that enable e-businesses to improve their customer services during peak season.

Prepare Concrete Plan Beforehand – As the adage says “Better safe than sorry”, it is always better to prepare an action plan prior 2-3 months of festive or holiday season. In order to create full-proof plan, collect facts like current workflow rate and expected rate in peak season, understanding expectations of customers, reasons of customers’ dissatisfaction, whether to hire temporary staffing solutions or not. All the important details are easy to extract from the last year’s data. Plan ahead and make it understand to each and every employee of company so that everybody remains on the same page when peak season starts.

Empower Team by Providing Training – Customers do not appreciate if they need to wait a lot for getting their calls answered. Moreover, if customer support staff is unable to solve the query and passes the call to seniors, customers definitely feel disappointed. So first of all, it is crucial to train your employees thoroughly. Provide them crystal clear understanding about your products and services. Conduct regular knowledge transfer sessions and role plays to lower call turnaround times. Suggest ways about how to handle customers’ queries quickly yet efficiently. Invest in building an easy to use and search product knowledge base with detailed FAQs, step by step instructions, and troubleshooting guidelines, manuals and pictures. Of course, it is a daunting task to please every customer during peak season, but little effort in the right direction will definitely go a long way.

Staff up for holiday season – Whether you decide to hire temporary staff or decide to get on a board a customer service outsourcing company for holiday season staffing, you do need to prepare well in advance for additional holiday staffing. Outsourcing to an experienced BPO company does have a lot more benefit than hiring temporary staff directly in-house. Such companies usually offer seasonal staffing solutions and have required tools and hands-on experience of handling high customers’ traffic during holiday season and their customer support agents are ready to hit the ground running. The last thing you want to do is deal with hiring, training, managing and retaining in house temporary staff during your busy season. The smarter choice is to take advantage of temporary staffing solutions from an expert call center provider, be it an offshore call center or onshore.

Motivate Employees to Motivate Customers – Employees with happy state of mind are more productive and offer adequate solutions to customers’ queries. When businesses expect something extra from employees, it is equally important to offer them extra – in the form of incentives, recognitions or cash rewards. Allow them to take frequent breaks, praise them for their achievements, roll-out extra hours’ incentive scheme, etc. After all, holiday season is for everybody- be it customers or employees. If employees are working hard to build and retain your brand reputation, business should not also stay behind to show their fondness towards them.

Personalize your Response –Businesses do follow offering customized services to customers in ordinary days, but due to peak season’s rush, they often forgo it.  Customers always expect special treatment from the service providers and seldom pay heed to peak or off season. So, do not forget to add a touch of personalization and treat them like a “VIP or KING” during holiday season as well. Send personalized email addressing them by their names and messages like “ Dear ABC, you have not purchase anything from us in the last 3 weeks”, “ ABC, we are really missing you at XYZ”, etc.

Learn Lessons from Customers’ Feedback - Always remember, it may happen that happy customers do not applaud you but dissatisfied customers tend to complain. Therefore, spare some time from your busy schedule to understand what are customers’ trends and expectations during holiday season. Take a look at their feedback forms filled by them during last year peak season and try to fix all loopholes this time. Indubitably, customers’ feedback encompasses scores of ideas for businesses improve their customer services and increase customers’ satisfaction level.

To conclude, holiday or peak season is the best time to offer unique shopping experience to your valuable customers. Thus, avoid following “one size fits all” approach. Gear up yourself to provide such level of customer service which actually sets a benchmark for others to follow.  Share your thoughts about strategies followed by you for handling customers’ queries during peak time.

Source: https://livesalesman.com/7-tactics-to-ensure-great-customer-service-during-peak-season/

2022 Buyers Guide

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Speech Technology

 

1.)

Premium Listing Call Center Studio Call Center Studio Call Center Studio is the world’s first call center built on Google and is one of the most secure and stable systems with some of the industry’s best reporting. It is one of the most full-featured enterprise grade systems (with the most calling features, one of the best call distribution, outbound dialing features and integrations—including IVR, AI Speech Recognition, blended inbound/outbound calling and includes Google’s new Dialogflow and Speech API. Call Center Studio is the absolute easiest to use (with a 10 minute setup), and is the price performance leader with lower equipment cost and less setup time.

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Aculab VoiSentry VoiSentry is a voice biometric engine for speaker verification / identification. It is delivered as a virtual instance to be controlled by an application via APIs and can be deployed in whatever is the most appropriate environment i.e. public cloud, private cloud or on-premise. It is generally deployed as a white-label or OEM product, whereby Aculab’s partner integrates it into their own solution/platform and offers it as an integral part of their service. Unless they go public with it, none of their clients would even know that it was Aculab’s VoiSentry engine under the hood. As with any biometric speaker verification system, VoiSentry is language and dialect independent.

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Agara Agara is an autonomous virtual voice agent powered by Real-time Voice AI. It is designed to have intelligent conversations with your customers, vendors, and partners without any assistance from human agents. It can handle a wide variety of calls including inbound customer care calls, outbound lead generation calls, appointment scheduling calls, and overdue payment recovery calls. Agara is available for several industries including banking, insurance, retail, e-commerce, airlines, and telecom. Powered by advanced Real-time Voice AI that understands speech in real-time, automatically determines the right process to follow and guides the caller along in the process with natural conversation.

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Call Tracking Metrics Execute automated actions based on words spoken by your customer. Our intelligent word detection and transcription tools make it easier for you to decipher the content of your customer conversations and automate action based on those insights. Transform the audio of your calls into speaker-organized scripts so you can easily search your call log for specific words from a conversation, or automatically detect when words of intent are spoken by your customer. Listen in on and highlight common patterns in order to execute triggers to initiate a new action or workflow, such as emailing a manager if the word “cancel” is spoken on a call. You can also set up to automatically redact content from a transcript, such as sensitive health information transmitted on a call.

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Daisee Daisee Daisee builds technology that empowers people to solve problems by making interactions simple and smart so they can have a more significant impact, be more productive and be better at what they do. We believe incremental improvements carry huge potency and provide exponentially greater change for the better. Genesys customers can now automate risk and quality management using Daisee’s speech and sentiment analytics and remediation workflow software. Daisee helps improve customer experience, ensure regulatory compliance, identify missed commercial opportunities & training requirements as well as provide valuable insights back to the business directly from the frontline – the true voice-of-... (read more)Daisee builds technology that empowers people to solve problems by making interactions simple and smart so they can have a more significant impact, be more productive and be better at what they do. We believe incremental improvements carry huge potency and provide exponentially greater change for the better. Genesys customers can now automate risk and quality management using Daisee’s speech and sentiment analytics and remediation workflow software. Daisee helps improve customer experience, ensure regulatory compliance, identify missed commercial opportunities & training requirements as well as provide valuable insights back to the business directly from the frontline – the true voice-of-the-customer. Unlike legacy speech analytics providers that simply transcribe audio to text and use ‘word spotting’ (i.e building a database of synonyms for every use case - ‘angry’ and ‘manager’ as well as ‘upset’ and ‘supervisor’ and simply spotting for those words), the engine has proprietary use of its sentiment language – a University innovation developed at Daisee, resulting in far more accurate transcription, enabling derivation of the context of a conversation. The Programmable Scorecard™ scores every call, and automatically activates a workflow for low-scoring, high-risk calls in near-real-time so they can be immediately reviewed and remediated. As the solution is pre-trained out of the box, deployment is a matter of weeks, not months and there is no setup or professional services fees – just a straightforward SaaS based pricing model. Ensure 100% of your phone interactions are not only monitored but also analyzed and scored with high-risk calls triaged for fast review and remediation.

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Eckoh EckohASSIST Advanced speech recognition and natural language expertise that routes callers by simply asking ‘how can I help you?’. It allows customers to use their own words to ask for what they want and steers them to the right place. Menus are eliminated altogether and contact centres can use a single inbound telephone number.

7.)	MattsenKumar LLC SmartSpeech SmartSpeech – The Best In Class Speech Analytics Software An all-inclusive speech analytics application that enables you to visualize your audio using state-of-the-art speech recognition, transcription, and text analytics technologies.

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Medallia V-Blaze Speech to Text Our GPU-accelerated, AI-based technology enables you to deliver greater insights to the contact center by transcribing audio into analyzable text. - Transcribe large volumes of recorded audio quickly - Integrate transcripts with your analytics or business intelligence platform - Reduce your hardware footprint and minimize total cost of ownership

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Nemesysco InTone Suite - Emotion Detection via Voice Analysis InTone™ is a voice analysis tool geared to detect genuine emotional and cognitive reactions regardless of the speaker’s language or chosen intonation. It integrates into existing contact center environments and provides realtime indications of both client and agent emotional reactions throughout all ongoing calls. This unique set of indications assists managers and call center representatives to truly understand the client, improve call center performance, easily detect angry calls, elevate training efficiency and provide a tailored customer experience in every single call. Nemesysco's contact center technology is also available in API and SDK forms. Please visit our website for information about our product portfolio.

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Voxjar Voxjar Voxjar is your one-stop-shop for driving better phone calls with your customers. We're a modern Conversation Analytics and Call Coaching Platform. - Custom Charts and Dashboards give you the freedom to analyze calls from the highest level down to the details of each conversation. - AI-Powered Speech Analytics transcribes, searches, and analyzes your reps' phone conversations, at scale. - Quality Assurance and Call Coaching tools let you evaluate and improve agent performance with a human touch. - Long term recording storage for historical analysis All of these together provide the holistic, easy-to-use software that you need to manage a modern call team and create better con... (read more)Voxjar is your one-stop-shop for driving better phone calls with your customers. We're a modern Conversation Analytics and Call Coaching Platform. - Custom Charts and Dashboards give you the freedom to analyze calls from the highest level down to the details of each conversation. - AI-Powered Speech Analytics transcribes, searches, and analyzes your reps' phone conversations, at scale. - Quality Assurance and Call Coaching tools let you evaluate and improve agent performance with a human touch. - Long term recording storage for historical analysis All of these together provide the holistic, easy-to-use software that you need to manage a modern call team and create better conversations with your customers. Voxjar brings value across all departments to improve Sales, Marketing, Customer Care, Collections, Compliance, and even your Product Team. Deep insights into each customer conversation will invigorate every corner of your business. Start today with a free 14-day trial

 

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