Read Time: 10 minutes
Table of Contents
Intro
Navigating the holiday season or busy peaks of the year can be stressful for businesses and customers. These busy surges can increase product demand, cause shipping delays, heighten customer frustration, and create employee burnout. If this is the case for your business, don’t panic.
In this article, we’ll discuss how to identify busy seasons and share how seasonal call center outsourcing can ease the load for your employees and customers.
Key takeaways
- Who? In-house call centers often need help keeping up with customer demand during busy seasons.
- What? Using seasonal call center outsourcing grants you access to fully trained agents ready to provide seamless holiday season customer service.
- Why? Call center outsourcing during busy seasons can reduce wait times, enhance call quality, and provide more tailored customer service.
- How? Finding the ideal outsourcing call center partner can help you scale for seasonal trends, plan for required support, train agents, and monitor and evaluate real-time performance.
Meeting the challenges of seasonal business demands
Understanding seasonal demand is the first step in preparing to meet the needs of customer support. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
Anticipate seasonal business spikes
Almost every industry has seasonal business spikes. For retailers and e-commerce businesses, holiday shopping can start as early as October. For accounting firms and private CPAs, January to April is a busy time to prepare and submit taxes. The same goes for open enrollment for medical benefits and insurance. Using historical data to track busy seasons from previous fiscal years allows you to forecast when the next season will strike.
Common pressure points in peak seasons
For businesses across different industries, the busy season comes with a set of frustrations. Some of the common pressure points businesses can experience are:
Limited resources: During peak seasons, businesses can be impacted by a shortage of labor, low stock of inventory, delays in the supply chain, overloaded IT systems, and limited storage space.
Longer wait times: With limited resources, customers experience longer wait times than expected.
Impact on brand image: Customer brand perception can be negatively impacted if holiday season customer service isn’t well-equipped to handle the demand.
Influence on customer service
During the holidays or other peak seasons, customer support teams may struggle to meet the demands, resulting in longer response times, lower customer satisfaction, and burnout.
Why in-house call centers struggle with seasonal demand
As businesses approach peak seasons, many in-house call centers need help to keep up with demand. This can be the result of over-reliance on in-house resources, the high financial and operational costs associated with providing temporary options, and a lack of scalable options. Without the right resources or support, these busy periods can strain your team, frustrating employees and customers.
Advantages of call center outsourcing during busy seasons
Now that you understand the influence seasonal demand can have on customer support teams, let’s explore the advantages of call center outsourcing.
Cost-effective scaling
Instead of hiring new full-time employees for peak-season customer support, outsourcing allows you to save on costs by only paying for the services you need.
Access to trained agents
Outsourcing provides access to trained agents and ready-to-go resources during peak seasons, eliminating the time and cost of recruiting and training.
24/7 service availability
Customers can enjoy round-the-clock service and find answers to their questions at any time of the day.
Shorter customer wait times
With fully-trained agents available 24/7, businesses can reduce call center wait times and lower the rate of abandoned calls.
Enhanced call quality
Some outsourcing call centers use call monitoring and AI tools to improve call quality by tracking metrics and reviewing calls regularly for agent feedback.
Access to multilingual support
Using call center staffing for peak seasons gives you access to agents who speak multiple languages so your customers can communicate what they need in their preferred language.
Personalized service
Personalized customer service is critical in busy seasons, especially during the holidays. With call center outsourcing, agents are trained to understand your brand, products, and customer profiles to provide more tailored customer support.
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4 essential tips for scaling call center outsourcing during busy seasons
If you’re strongly considering call center outsourcing for customer support for the holiday season or other busy times of the year, here are four tips to scale your business operations.
1. Look for seasonal demand trends
Every business faces busy seasons, but knowing when they happen is a great way to plan ahead. To find out when the busy season is for you, start gathering data using call monitoring and call center software. These tools will allow you to view the call volume, call length, average wait time, agent status, and call abandonment rates to track patterns of influxes in customer demand.
2. Plan for required support
After collecting enough data, you can look back on the previous fiscal year to see how many calls, live chats, emails, and social media comments you received from customers. Acquiring this information will help you map out which channels need support and how many team members you need to take care of customers.
3. Train agents early
Train agents ahead of time about your brand values, customer expectations, and common inquiries to help them prepare and deliver more personalized service.
4. Monitor performance in real-time
Monitor and evaluate customer service metrics regularly by reviewing dashboards and reports to know if there are enough agents to support your customers.
Finding your ideal outsourcing match
When selecting the right outsourcing call center partner, reflect on the following questions:
- Expertise: Has this call center successfully handled seasonal demand in this industry?
- Technology capabilities: Can their technology integrate with your existing systems?
- Customer experience focus: Do they spend time onboarding call agents to learn about your brand so they can represent you effectively?
Having the answers to these questions will simplify the decision process and ensure you choose the right match.
How Global Response transforms seasonal challenges into opportunities
At Global Response, we have extensive experience managing customer support during high-peak seasons for industries like retail and e-commerce. From business process outsourcing to multilingual customer support, we deliver tailored solutions to meet your seasonal needs, ensuring smooth operations and exceptional service during peak times.
But don’t just take our word for it; read this case study to discover how we helped one major retailer increase online sales by 25%.
Ready to handle your busy seasons like a pro? Contact Global Response today to learn how call center outsourcing during the busy season can transform your customer experience.
