Q&A with Chatdesk: How to make the holiday season a CX success

Greg (Zendesk): As we approach the holiday season, which stakeholders within your company should CX leaders meet with to plan (if any)?

Aneto (Chatdesk):

• Marketing: Confirm what promotions and marketing activities will be running during the holidays. Anticipate the types of questions customers will have and align on the messaging for responses.
• Fulfillment: For e-commerce businesses, the holidays often cause a spike in order status requests right before the holidays and then a spike in returns right after. Discuss potential approaches to create self service FAQs, tools and forms to make it easy for customers to help themselves or give your team the needed information easily.
• Your team: Confirm the staffing schedules for your team so that you have enough team members to handle the increase in volume. Ensure that everyone has sufficient training and updated information. I’ve also seen some companies plan some fun activities to celebrate and reward the team after since some of them might not be able to take vacation during the actual holidays.

Greg (Zendesk): What types of holiday changes in the CX process have you seen brands make?

Andrew (Chatdesk): Great question, Greg! Many best-in-class companies we work with focus their CX changes on educating new customers and limiting contacts. Here are a few examples:

• Creating specific holiday support landing pages with commonly asked questions

• Updating macros with personalized responses for typical holiday season questions

• Adding self-service options and automation to handle Order Status and Returns / Exchange requests. Many of the brands we work with use tools like Loop Returns, Happy Returns, Returnly, Return Magic and others

Greg (Zendesk): Any creative approaches you’ve seen to drive awareness and customer loyalty?

Aneto (Chatdesk): Loyal customers sometimes miss out on the holiday promotions because they miss the specific time period when deals are available. This causes disappointment and further increases in ticket volume with complaints or requests for price adjustments.

To address this, one of our customers designed a promotion specifically for existing customers which was sent out prior to the broader campaign. This helped to build loyalty and also reduce ticket volume.

Greg (Zendesk): What should the staffing plan look like? Hire temps? Bring in the team members from other functions?

Andrew (Chatdesk): First off, I encourage each company to analyze last year’s holiday volume and / or Q3 2020 to understand how your volume might spike.

Once you have a sense of the additional staff you need to handle the increased volume, identify staffing options that provide the following:

• 🚀 Low cost and fast ramp up: On average, it can take up to 6 weeks and cost $7,000-$15,000 to just train and onboard 3 additional support agents.
• 📈 On-demand pricing: Given the increase of pre-sale questions from customers during after-hours, you want a staffing option that extends your service hours, without being too expensive.
• 💌 Personalized support: There is a huge emphasis this year on customers demanding more personalized support. Brands who can hire support agents who truly represent their brand will provide a better customer experience and drive more sales.

To learn more about how we’re helping companies launch on-demand support for the holidays with US-based superfans, check out www.chatdesk.com/teams or feel free to reach out to me directly.

Greg (Zendesk): Given the increase in volume, how should brands handle customer “moments of truth” such as late deliveries and returns?

Aneto (Chatdesk): There’s no easy answer to this one. The key is to prepare and align with your leadership on what types of policy exceptions and appeasements you will be able to offer for different scenarios.

Even if there’s no budget for appeasements, we have seen companies achieve high CSAT and NPS during the holidays with the following approaches:

• Share proactive updates. If there’s a delay, don’t wait for customers to reach out

• Apologize profusely and show empathy in your language.

• Give customers alternatives. Examples we’ve seen include shipping out an alternate product, discounts on a future order, etc. Customers won’t always take the offer, but they typically appreciate the gesture.

Greg (Zendesk): How should you measure success during the holidays? What are the key team metrics (e.g., response time, conversion) that should you monitor during this time?

Andrew (Chatdesk): Key success metrics should center around sales, customer happiness, and efficiency. Here are three metrics that most of our customers are tracking:

• 📊 Utilization Rate: Ratio of time your agents are handling tickets by total time worked. Industry Average is 60-70%
• 🌟 CSAT / NPS (Net Promoter Score): How satisfied are customers with their experience and are they willing to recommend your services to others. You can enable Zendesk Satisfaction Ratings if you don’t have this setup already
• ✉️ Response time: Time taken (in seconds) by the agent to respond to a customer’s message
• 🛒 Conversion rate: Percentage of visitors (online/social) who purchase something on your site. Industry average is 1-2%

Greg (Zendesk): What machine learning and artificial intelligence tools can companies use to manage costs and increase efficiency?

Aneto (Chatdesk): There are a lot of great tools out there. Here are few that companies can roll out quickly in time for the holidays:

• Zendesk Answer Bot is a great option for teams to help deflect repetitive tickets from email and chat.
• Zendesk Guide has a feature called Content Cues which will provide automated suggestions for new articles in your Help Center.

• The Chatdesk Teams solution that Andrew mentioned earlier is also a great add on to Zendesk to help solve repetitive tickets and increase conversion by 10%+ on Facebook and Instagram with additional personalization. You can be up and running in a few days with a free pilot for the holidays and no dev work or pre-work is needed.

Greg (Zendesk): What are some risks of rolling out new tools or processes so close to the holidays?

Andrew (Chatdesk): Key risks we see include potential errors and decreased customer satisfaction scores and sales. Unfortunately, some companies are not able to fully test the new tool or process in time to ensure the entire team (especially temporary workers) can comfortably utilize them.

📅 We recommend that companies launch new tools and processes at least 3 weeks before the holiday period begins.