Providing a great customer experience during the holiday rush

In a Zendesk Research survey, our team found that ticket volumes can increase as much as 42% over the holidays. With this year’s busy season right around the corner, it’s more important than ever to make sure your support business is ready for the rush. To help keep the annual flurry of customer inquiries manageable, we’ve compiled a list of tips that’ll help your team deflect more tickets and keep holiday CSAT scores high.

We’ll be covering all of these tips in a webinar on October 19th. Join our product marketing team if you’d like to learn more about any of the features mentioned in more detail.

1. Build a list (and check it twice)

Having easy to navigate FAQs in your Help Center can be your largest source of deflection over the holiday season. With over 67% of customers preferring to self-serve over traditional channels of support, your FAQ can be a one stop shop for all holiday related questions.

If you haven’t built an FAQ already, we suggest your team take a look at which articles got the most views over previous busy seasons and then dig into your ticket data to see what your customers ask about most frequently. When you find a question that comes up often, use the Knowledge Capture App to quickly identify articles that need updating or turn tickets into content for other customers. This’ll help save time and ensure that there aren’t any gaps in your Help Center.

2. Bring the gift of self-service (to your site or mobile app)

An easy way to help customers through their holiday buying journey is by enabling the Zendesk web widget, a lightweight, self-service channel that supports your customers as they browse your site or mobile app. Customers such as Le Tote were able to decrease chat volumes by 60% while maintaining a 94% CSAT score by simply adding web widget to their site.

To make things even easier on your customers, enable features such as contextual help, that surface information to your customers based on the page they’re viewing. And if your customers do need to submit a ticket, make sure that your agents are equipped with Pathfinder – now with mobile activity – to help your agents save time by not suggesting articles that a customer may have already seen.

3. Bots… the new elves in your support workshop

During the holiday season the average number of tickets per agent can increase by 17%. With many of these inquiries likely being repetitive questions that bog down your agents, why not bring in the good kind of know-it-all for a little help? Customers like Dollar Shave Club have used Answer Bot to resolve up to 20% of their tickets, while maintaining high CSAT scores.

If you find questions that commonly come up during the holiday flurry, you can put Answer Bot to work, which’ll respond back to customers with relevant content from your knowledge base. And if you’ve followed the FAQ tips above, you’ll have some great articles to suggest to your customers. For the average retailer, this can help save your agents 6 hours of time and give 663 hours back to your customers.

4. Chat your way to a few more holiday sales

Live chat is a great way to help customers through their buying journey during the holiday season and to ensure that your team can solve customer requests as efficiently as possible. And with Zendesk Chat, you can ensure that your agents are given credit when they help customers successfully complete a sale.

During the holidays, features such as skills-based routing and shortcuts can help direct chats to agents that are best equipped to help your customers and give agents a way to quickly provide pre-defined responses to repetitive questions. If any chats need additional follow up, integrating Chat into your CRM will allow your team to respond to unresolved tickets via email or by phone for a nice personal touch.

Last but not least, don’t forget to pass a little bit of holiday cheer into your chat widget! Spice up your website with a custom, festive chat widget that’ll help your customers immerse themselves in the season’s festivities.

5. A few more gifts under the tree

Put some tools in your agent’s hands this holiday season that’ll help them solve tickets more efficiently. Integrations that surface relevant information have helped customers like BaubleBar see a 70% one touch ticket rate with an integration to Magento.

Some apps you and your agents will love are:

Shopify – Our Shopify app surfaces valuable order, shipping, and billing information to your agents. You can even add a Zendesk Support Web Widget to your Shopify-powered site!

Pathfinder (now with mobile activity!) – Give your agents more insight into the articles that customers have browsed before they submit a ticket. This app helps your team reduce resolution rates by not suggesting articles that a customer may have already seen

Looking to learn a bit more about the features mentioned in this blog post? Join us for our holiday webinar on October 19th.