Busy season is two words that can strike excitement and nervous energy for a CX organization. Whether you’re in the retail industry and are preparing for holiday shopping or an insurance company looking to get ahead of the open enrollment surge, preparation is the first step towards success. Equipping your team for the demands of peak season can be a game-changer for your organization, staff, and, most importantly, your customers.
Recently, Lindsay Fifield, Forethought’s Director of Customer Success, and Bron Rasmussen, CX Operations Coordinator at Cotopaxi, shared their expert tips on how their teams are preparing for the high-volume busy season period. You can watch that webinar or read ahead to learn some of their tips.
What does busy season mean for a CX org?
Busy season can be defined as a period where traffic or support tickets increase in volume. For your organization consider the time period where you require an all-hands-on-deck approach and probably have vacation blackout periods.
In the retail industry, this period is generally Black Friday through the end of January as holiday shopping increases activity across support channels. Here are a few additional examples of busy season across various industries:
- Travel and Hospitality: Spring break, summer, and holiday travel
- Financial Services: Tax season, end-of-year
- Health insurance: Open enrollment periods
Getting Started: What is the best way to analyze prior seasons?
To master preparing for extra traffic, you should analyze prior season’s trends and data. Look back at what worked and what didn’t. Where and why were customers reaching out to support? How can you optimize the experience to be proactive versus reactive?
Here are three tips to consider when reviewing your data and trends:
- Document Key Insights: Analyze last year’s wins and losses. Identify patterns in customer behavior, recurring issues, and effective resolutions.
- Learn and Adapt: Use insights to enhance training, improve technology, and streamline processes. Anticipate challenges and prepare solutions early.
- Communicate Findings: Communicate findings across teams to ensure alignment, fostering a more cohesive and responsive approach.
Goal Setting: What are you hoping to achieve this busy season?
If you’re working with customer success, you want to be agile, moving as needs change, which is a clear and consistent way to stay on track. If you need a checklist to keep handy when outlining your objectives and milestones, check out our list below:
- Assess Your Current Capacity
- Define Specific, Measurable Objectives
- Set Incremental Milestones
- Align Goals with Team Capabilities
- Account for Potential Challenges
- Monitor Progress Regularly
- Communicate and Motivate
- Review and Adjust Goals as Needed
Should I invest in a knowledge base?
A great way to keep deflection rates high is to ensure your knowledge base is up-to-date. This can help improve your customer experience because it can reduce the number of tickets created that require agent support.
Tips to get started with a knowledge base:
- Leverage AI Tools: Use AI solutions like Forethought to scan support tickets and auto-generate content based on frequent customer queries.
- Identify Common Queries: Analyze past interactions to pinpoint the most frequently asked questions and issues.
- Create Clear, Concise Articles: Develop simple guides, FAQs, and troubleshooting steps. Use visuals to enhance understanding.
- Regular Updates: Schedule content reviews to ensure accuracy as products or services evolve.
- Organize for Easy Navigation: Structure with intuitive categories and a robust search feature for quick answers.
Forethought has four core products that you can use to optimize your customer experience, but the Discover tool is perfect for anyone looking to uplevel their knowledge base. Discover generates policies and knowledge base content that helps get you to scale your KB content with ease, outline topics not being covered and write articles covering those topics, and you can use it to identify holes within your KB content. All with the ability to tweak and implement quickly.
Forethought also allows you to build topics beforehand and leave them dormant until they are ready to go live. Here are some seasonal based content topics to consider:
- Gift cards
- Return Policies
- Shipping
- Gift wrapping
Don’t be afraid to get creative with your knowledge base topics and use the insights from your peak season to help improve your AI chatbot. Consider adding troubleshooting guides, FAQs, or a customer repository that ensures customers have a wide range of content to support your needs.
Next Up: Hiring, scheduling, and reporting
Hiring can fluctuate at different times, but it should always be a consideration when preparing for busy season.
If you are considering recruiting before busy season hits, keep these tips in mind:
- Start Early: Begin recruiting well ahead of peak season to secure the right talent.
- Define Clear Roles: Clearly outline job responsibilities to attract well-suited candidates.
- Develop a Strong Onboarding Plan: Ensure smooth onboarding with structured training, resources, and policy introductions.
- Assign Mentors: Pair new hires with experienced team members for guidance and support.
- Plan Training in Advance: Schedule sessions to equip new hires with the skills they need before the busy season hits.
If you don’t plan to recruit seasonal hires at this phase, you should be prepping managers, leads, and trainers to prepare content. You can consider promoting tenured agents to run AI programs, which can provide additional career paths for more experienced staff.
Optimize Your Reporting Tools
Double-check your reporting tools to ensure they provide the insights you need. And if you’re using an AI tool, clarify the specific insights you want to gain.
Key Insights to Consider:
- How quickly is our AI responding to customer inquiries?
- Is our Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) remaining strong?
- Has ticket volume increased? If so, by how much?
- Are we successfully deflecting the right tickets?
When is the best time to schedule staff?
Workforce management can be tricky with AI. Consider ways to maximize efficiency. If you’re worried about how to plan for the right number of on-the-ground workers to handle the busy season, a few examples could include:
- Cross-training on multiple channels depending on where your customers are coming in
- Having your chats be flexible and prioritizing ques
- Seeing how you want to address specialty ques or escalation for high-priority customers like enterprise.
Some tips to help you prepare your staff:
- Plan for Overtime: Be ready to offer overtime during high-demand periods while managing staff fatigue effectively.
- Monitor Real-Time Metrics: Use live data to adjust staffing levels dynamically, preventing team overload.
- Prioritize Key Roles: Ensure critical positions impacting customer experience are fully staffed.
- Cross-Train Employees: Provide cross-training to boost flexibility and handle unexpected surges smoothly.
Is it too late to revise policies and update systems?
When encountering busy season, you always want to be proactive with your team and over communicate to ensure clear communication with your customers. Seasonal adjustments must be made to accommodate customer needs. You can adjust your policies based on the peak season or consider extending return windows or having different gift return options.
Lastly: Staffing and your CSM
Your goals are set, your planning is done, and now it’s time to execute. You can finalize your staffing schedules, account for out-of-office times, and communicate any policy changes to the team.
Here are a few examples of approaches you can take to complete staffing and onboarding:
- Create a Comprehensive Onboarding Plan: Create a detailed onboarding process covering training, resources, and company policies to help new hires acclimate quickly.
- Assign Mentors or Buddies: Pair new hires with experienced team members for guidance and support throughout the onboarding journey.
- Schedule Training Sessions: Organize training sessions to ensure new hires have the skills and knowledge needed before peak seasons.
- Gather Feedback: Collect feedback from new hires post-onboarding to refine and enhance the process for future employees.
How can I work with my CSM?
As your partner, Forethought can help launch you into a successful busy season. Collaborate with your dedicated Customer Success Manager to ensure everything is set for a smooth launch.
How we can help:
- Utilizing banners to share information with customers
- Update messaging modified hours of operation/SLAs
- Add seasonal Autoflows
- Interactive Email
- Test Loop API for Return/Exchange Requests, and more
Want to learn more about how your CX teams can use your metrics to create a successful strategy during peak season? Download our Playbook for Tracking and Optimizing Customer Experiences.
