“Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful.”
Norman Peale’s description of Christmas is perhaps the most appropriate way to convey the holiday mood.
Christmas is that time of the year when the festive spirit is at an all-time high. It’s also the time when excited holiday shoppers tend to take over most retail platforms, as well as over a fair share of your sanity.
But what’s Christmas without gifts? During the holiday season, behind every hustling shopper, there's a person trying to ensure a smile on their loved one’s face. After all, millions look forward to Christmas for the cheer and festivities.
"Tis the season to be jolly and ace customer service!”
We can speak only about the merriment and cheer of the holiday season, but that will not take away the sleigh-load (pun intended) of customer service issues that are bound to arrive during all the Christmas shopping.
Learn from Santa, Start Preparing Early
Imagine the horror if Santa didn’t start his preparations on time and did not make arrangements to deliver your presents on Christmas Eve. Would you be happy? Of course not!
Similarly, your existing strategy to deliver a great customer experience (CX) may not work during the holiday shopping season. More often than not businesses don’t make any special arrangements on how to handle service tickets during the Christmas rush until it’s too late.
The Covid-19 pandemic transformed the way people shop. Today’s consumers are well-versed with “phygital” (a combination of physical and digital) shopping platforms and make an effort to get the best deals. On the other hand, you need to ensure that your customers and agents get the best of your brand experience. How will you create an appropriate action plan?
Create a support strategy that ensures Christmas isn’t ruined by the holiday shopping rush, and be ready to deliver an exceptional experience that’ll make your customers feel valued.
Know Your Customers
One of the first things you should do before any shopping season is to try and understand your customers. What influences their buying behavior, and using that information to increase sales and deliver exceptional customer support.
Compiling customer attributes based on parameters like demography, shopping choices, behavior, etc. helps you create broad categories of typical customer qualities (buyer personas).
Creating personas is another way of segmenting and identifying your target customers from afar.
The results? Streamlined and targeted advertising, better conversions, reduced marketing expenditure, and better ROI (return on investment).
Popular Customer Profiles
Take a look at some common shopper profiles based on their frequently exhibited qualities:
- Traditional Christmas Shoppers - Who plan their shopping weeks in advance.
- Brand Loyalists - Who are selective with brands they shop from. Best to develop a personal touch with them over time.
- Connected Shoppers - Who are diligent about their shopping and make purchasing decisions after going through reviews from friends and family.
- Impulse Buyers - Who make instant purchase decisions and generally cannot say no to great deals. They are the most prized class of shoppers for merchants. Often, a healthy chunk of marketing and advertising is directed to them, so as to allure them into making more purchases.
- Experiential Shoppers - Who love the complete experience and value the memories that are created during shopping. Whether in-store or online, they appreciate the effort taken by merchants to woo them and often turn brand loyalists.
Business Ecosystem During Christmas
- Spending has come level with what it was before the pandemic across retail sectors worldwide. eCommerce continues to lead across various product categories while physical shopping remains subdued.
- A Deloitte Study says that almost 40% of US retailers expect double-digit online channel growth. The average shopper spent US $924 when shopping online last year, as against $440 when shopping in-store.
- Engagement with digital platforms continues to remain high and e-commerce is likely to contribute almost 60% of the total earnings for businesses.
Supporting businesses not just during the holiday season, but all year round in an organized manner requires smart helpdesk software that’s intelligent and intuitive.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Santa Claus could come bearing gifts that took care of most of your ticketing and customer service issues and make Christmas fun for everyone?
We hear you.
"This Christmas, let ThinkOwl be your Santa and help you take care of ticketing and customer service issues."
ThinkOwl is an AI-powered service desk software with which you can optimally answer customer inquiries across multiple channels. The software helps your customer service with:
- The fastest response times.
- Highest possible automation.
- Intuitive operability.
Let’s see how.
Christmas is a peak holiday shopping season, and that means a spike in tickets and service requests. A spike in call volumes doesn’t necessarily have to be taxing for your agents or your customers.
ThinkOwl helps you rank high in the customer satisfaction scale with a helpdesk that is smart, intuitive, automates most manual tasks, and facilitates robust case management that increases the overall efficiency of your service agents.
Also Read: 10 Essential Customer Service KPIs You Need To Track Now
Reduce AHT
Long average handling times (AHT) can be very stressful for your customers, and hurt service quality. With ThinkOwl automation, workflows are streamlined and no valuable time is lost in forwarding cases to appropriate helpdesks.
Let AI Do Your Routine Work
ThinkOwl’s AI learns how to handle service tickets from agents and remembers the solution provided for various cases as they come by. The smart engine learns autonomously and after a little training, it comes up with intelligent suggestions that help in faster case resolution.
Dispatcher AI
Dispatcher AI in ThinkOwl employs advanced AI capabilities to sort incoming tickets to their relevant categories. The feature has a unique capability to sift through customer messages from across multiple channels and routes them to appropriate desks, according to the topic and urgency.
Improved Communication
ThinkOwl’s AI helps you with your communication to customers and saves agents from typing long emails with similar data to clients and partners. The AI implicitly learns the nitty-gritties of ticket resolution and suggests accurate customer responses for up to 95% of all queries, thus saving time.
Also Read: Why Workflow Automation Is Imperative For Your Business
Predictive Insights and Smart Responses
Empower your agents so that no customer query remains unanswered. ThinkOwl keeps your agents updated with minute-to-minute details of what their customers want. The predictive insights and suggestions keep getting better as ThinkOwl remembers what worked effectively last time, and suggests the best next move.
Smart Responses help you get the best out of your customer support teams with minimal supervision and effort. Powered by AI, Smart Response helps you drive up your customer satisfaction score with thoughtful, contextual, and timely messaging.
Guided Mode
ThinkOwl’s Guided Mode provides a dedicated view of cases to agent supervisors and allows them to see which agent is working on which case.
This feature gives supervisors an overall view of the case assignments all in one place.
It prioritizes cases automatically and simplifies agent workflows by drawing out the most important cases to them, one by one.
Encourage Self-Help with Knowledge
ThinkOwl’s Knowledge is an information repository containing product information, training manuals, self-help guides, and answers to frequently asked questions. It helps customers and agents find answers for themselves quicker and eliminates data digging or application hopping.
Multichannel Support
ThinkOwl serves multiple channels at a single helpdesk, so you don't have to juggle channels to respond to your customers. Stay connected and manage all your service requests from a variety of channels like social, email, text, chat through a central inbox.
ThinkOwl facilitates growth, promotes clear communication, keeps your agents empowered and updated with contextual customer data, as well as helps you plan and support the customer journey in an effortless manner.
What are you waiting for? Unbox Happiness with ThinkOwl.
To know more about how ThinkOwl can help your service agents deliver a smile on your customers' faces sign up for a 30-day free trial.
