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Customer Service: Help Desk Stress Test

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Today The Official Merchant Services Blog continues its special two-part series on Customer Service. We can’t stress enough how essential it is to focus on Customer Service –– especially now during the holiday shopping season when your business may be barraged with a lot more customers who have a lot more questions.

Yesterday, we shared with you a blog from Lauren Carlson at Software Advice. The blog gave detailed tips on how to prepare business and its customer support team for the holiday shopping season. Today we bring you the second half of Carlson’s customer service saga which focuses on utilizing the holiday season as a way to stress test your help desk.

Carlson suggests that “the holiday season represents a perfect laboratory for examining your business, as well as your performance at each point of customer contact.”

This is a compelling concept. As Carlson says, the holiday season gives you a chance to analyze your business –– especially the customer support side of it –– at super speed. Doing so lets merchants identify high performance areas that are effective under the added stress of the holiday season, as well as get some insight into areas that may need some improvement. To get merchants in the mindset of how the microcosm of the holiday season can fuel some quick on the spot analytics Carlson asks: “So you had 72 percent first-call resolution rates in August. Great. What about the day after Christmas?”

Carlson keys in on five areas of support that companies should examine during their holiday season to gauge their help desk.

How Effective is That Training?

Many merchants add seasonal help for the holiday shopping rush. It’s a tried and true method for the retail industry, for example, to take on some extra help at the end of the year to push through all that added hours and increase in customers. Carlson suggests this can be a catalyst for analyzing employee onboarding –– and get a good look at how effective your company’s system is for training and preparing new support staff.

She says “Companies should use this opportunity to examine the success of their training techniques, as well as the usability of their system.”

It’s really sound advice to keep track of your support staff’s effectiveness, and the holiday season definitely gives a merchant a focused period of time to quickly measure the staff’s performance.

How Well Do You Deal With Surprises?

The next area in help desk performance that Carlson says a company should measure during the holiday shopping season is something called The Collaboration Period. Carlson describes the first nine months of the year as a build-up or preparation period for a business. Mitch Lieberman, of Sword Ciboodle, calls that period the Coordination Period in Carlson’s blog. But, according to Lieberman, the holiday rush shifts into the Collaboration Period. Carlson quotes Lieberman as saying “Collaboration is when something is outside what could or should have been easily coordinated. Are you ready to collaborate on these emergency issues that you didn’t predict?”

Essentially, merchants can use this time to study how well support staff deals with surprises. How well can they go off script? How effectively can they cope with issues that crop up that weren’t prepared for and which aren’t on an FAQ or a PDF or a Guidelines e-mail.

Where Do the Problems Get Handled?

The next area of help desk effectiveness that Carlson suggests merchants should look at is peak load management. Businesses that bulk up with some seasonal help during the holiday rush tend to train those new employees on the basic level of support. They get training to help them stick to a script, deal with the first tier of issues in a protocol, or use the FAQ that was designed for the holiday season –– all really basic stuff. The intent being to keep the easy stuff out of the way of the veteran support team members, who are then expected to effectively handle the harder issues.

Carlson says some interesting statistics can be gathered through this dynamic: “Measuring the percentage of first-call resolutions compared to the percent of calls escalated will help to inform your peak load strategy. “

What’s Your Worst Case Scenario?

The next area Carlson says companies should analyze harkens back to the boy scouts mantra of “Be Prepared.” Carslon says “assume something bad is going to happen. It’s not pessimism. It’s good business. If you assume disaster will strike, you will have an emergency response system in place that’s ready to manage the disaster on all channels.”

It’s never good when disaster strikes. But it’s a much heavier burden on a merchant when disaster strikes during the high pressure holiday shopping period. So this is a good time period to gauge what a company’s emergency response process is. And, if things do go bad, get an up front look at how effective that protocol is. Being proactive, Carlson suggests, is the best approach. Use this time period to analyze your emergency procedures and tweak them to be the most effective they can be.  As Carlson puts it, “having proactive procedures mapped out for unforeseen emergencies will not prevent call spikes, but it can lower the spikes to a manageable amount.”

Are the Customers Satisfied?

The core element of your customer support team, and your help desk, is customer satisfaction. Is the customer happy? That’s what it all comes down to. Companies should be measuring customer satisfaction year-round. And Carlson’s blog concedes that point. But Carlson points out that the holiday shopping season heightens the importance of customer satisfaction. This is something The Official Merchant Services Blog has discussed during our series on holiday shopping as well. The stakes are higher during the focused frenzy that happens after Black Friday, so you need to make sure you’re keeping even the most basic tenets of customer service in mind at all times.

Carlson asks the question, “you might have great satisfaction rates during low-volume times of year, but is your support team still on par when things get hectic?”

She suggests something as simple as a survey of your customers asking how you did during the holidays –– basic feedback.

Host Merchant Services likes the idea of reaching out to the customers for feedback. It’s an effective way to continue to maintain the long-term relationship building goal of customer support. Or, simply put, it’s a nice way to let your customers know you value them and their input. HMS suggests utilizing your social media tools for a survey like this, as you can quickly interact with your customers through those tools and they can help you track and analyze the responses.

Conclusion

This is an effective checklist of ideas for merchants to monitor their customer support capabilities. There are some concrete suggestions here on ways to collect data that will help shape a company’s goals for delivering quality customer service. Carlson gives a lot of good tips in both parts of her series. The Official Merchant Services Blog is glad she shared these with us and hopes you find them useful too.

If anyone else has some tips or suggestions on how to improve customer service now in the holiday shopping season or any other time of the year, feel free to share in the comments section.

Customer Service: Tips From a Friend [2023 Update]

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Today The Official Merchant Services Blog begins a special two-part series on Customer Service. A previous blog focused on how important Customer Service is for a business during the holiday shopping season. We are currently in the midst of one of the busiest holiday shopping seasons on record, according to the early sales data that has been reported. So to bolster your efforts, we’re going to highlight information and advice brought to our attention from our friends over at Software Advice.

Fellow industry blogger Lauren Carlson ran a two-part series at Software Advice dealing specifically with customer service and the holidays. It’s an insightful series that begins with offering advice on how to prepare your customer service department –– namely your help desk –– for the rigors of increased business from holiday shopping.

And What Are Those Tips?

Carlson’s article was timed for the lead up to Black Friday, but much of its advice is still extremely relevant to merchants facing the rest of the season. After all, the questions that get asked at your help desk aren’t going to subside until after the holidays. Or as Carlson says, the guidelines she gives “if done, can prevent potential chaos and better prepare your agents to handle the spike. This translates to happier customers during the holidays, who will turn into repeat customers once the wrapping paper has settled.”

The first tip given is to create a holiday specific FAQ list. Carlson states that the types of questions a lot of help desks get hit with during the holiday season can vary from the normal questions that get asked the rest of the year and as such, suggests brainstorming and coming up with a list ahead of time to prepare. Due to timeliness, that may no longer be a viable option for a lot of merchants. But by now, you may have a pretty good handle on the varying questions that you were hit with on Black Friday and all through Cyber Week. Which brings us to the best advice found in the first tip: “Post the simpler questions up on your site to avoid spending time on those calls.”

This can be done to enhance the e-commerce experience, getting it out to your customers and providing them with both information that they need, and a click through into your site. Or this can be done just for your own help desk’s internal sanity, having a quick reference guide on hand for when they are barraged with these questions that make your list. As Carlson states, this type of list “will enable agents to resolve a majority of issues on the first call.” And it will be useful for the duration of the season, preventing your staff from having to scramble to find answers even as it gets to be late into the shopping season.

Cross-training to Stay Prepared

The next tip Carlson offers is to cross-train your staff. She cites Matt Trifiro, Senior VP of Marketing at Assistly who explains that cross-training your employees can help you reduce the need for hiring seasonal staff. Carlson says of cross-training: “Much like athletes cross-train to improve the whole body, companies can train every employee – from receptionists to accountants – to be a support agent, improving support across the entire organization.”

This is a great tip for merchants looking to weather the holiday shopping blitz but not go through the process of training seasonal help that they have to let go a short time later. It’s also a quick way to deal with support issues that may have just now cropped up well after Black Friday. Host Merchant Services itself utilizes that same philosophy in its own customer support structure and finds that it does help a business be more responsive and more effective at handling support issues year-round.

Carlson maps out the plan for cross-training your staff, suggesting that a merchant should equip all their employees to answer basic questions customers may have. Then Carlson says merchants should set up an escalation procedure for situations that require additional steps or expertise. This will create a smoother flow for service during the high traffic times of the holiday shopping season.

Communication Has Many Channels

The next tip Carlson gives revolves around communicating when your business is on its own holiday. A lot of Merchants, such as restaurants, have a different set of hours as the actual holidays approach. Carlson suggests merchants should communicate clearly and consistently with their customers about any downtime or time where the business is unavailable during the holiday shopping season. And in 2011, there are quite a lot of avenues in which to communicate this information: “Alert customers on every possible medium (website, Facebook, blog, Twitter, voicemail) of your seasonal hours and availability. Communicating this clearly will help avoid confusion and, more importantly, dissatisfaction.”

This information also applies to any other Merchant needing to reach out to its customers –– including adding extra service hours during holiday shopping like a lot of retailers do. Social media sites like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter are amazing tools available for customer interaction and can help you keep your customers up to date on all the latest developments your business goes through during the holiday shopping season.

Support Your Support Agents

The final tip Carlson gives for merchants to prepare their customer support help desk for the holiday shopping rush is to have a plan in place that will offer support for those who are your support agents. Carlson states: ” Help desk and support center employees will be very busy and likely very stressed during the holidays. Savvy companies will invest a lot of energy into supporting their agents via rewards, bonuses, in-office R&R, etc.”

Having something concrete in place that defuses stress and gives your support team some focus or incentive can help your business navigate through the increased stress and tension that holiday shopping can place on a business. This falls in line with Host Merchant Services’ own partnership protocols in the e-commerce section of its services –– where the company’s goal is to take the stress and burden of merchant services off of the business and onto the the merchant services provider. This enhances the overall partnership by making it less stressful for both partners. The same applies to customer service, especially during a time when the increase in business can exponentially increase stress.

Even though Black Friday has passed, this increased stress will continue to build. So it’s definitely not too late to consider implementing some sort of program or incentive to give your support staff both a tip of the hat for its hard work and a goal to strive for that will keep them going through the rest of the holiday rush.

Conclusion

Lauren Carlson offers some rock solid advice for customer support during the holiday shopping season. Many of the tips are easy to implement and do not take a lot of added time investment to get working. Host Merchant Services is always looking for useful insight on customer service to pass along to merchants. Quality customer service helps build long-term relationships with your customers, and can keep them coming back to you long after the holiday shopping season is over. Tomorrow The Official Merchant Services Blog will take a look at part two of Carlson’s series.