By Adam Simpson, CEO, Easy Office Phone
As two of the year’s biggest sales days approach, representing billions in revenues, retail-oriented companies and their partners must be prepared to address the customer onslaught by providing exceptional and efficient customer service. As a retailer, you know to expect a surge in consumer demand. In today’s virtual world, however, businesses must mind not only the crowd, but also the cloud.
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Your communications systems need to be up to the task. If you’ve already moved to a cloud-based phone service, you’re ahead of the mob, but you may not yet be using the full power of your hosted PBX to meet your clients’ needs.
Here are some ways to enhance responsiveness during these two crucial days:
Use Call Queuing
Call queues allow you to distribute incoming calls to multiple people, and will also hold calls in priority sequence if all agents are busy. You can easily change which agents participate in a given queue, and even give call preference to your top performers with a feature called skills-based routing.
Set Target Service Levels and Measure Results
Next, it’s time to measure. Responsiveness is critical during peak shopping periods — consumers will gladly shop at a competitor if your team can’t get to them in time. Determine an optimum response time, and then use the target service levels feature to determine how frequently your targets are actually being met in practice.
Use Tracking and Reporting Tools
You can go deeper with the tracking and reporting tools included with call queuing packages. These tools can show you how your contact center teams are performing and where they might have room for improvement. Remember to make these evaluations in advance of the busiest days so you can make any needed adjustments without the extra pressure. Available statistics typically include: total number of calls; how many calls were answered vs. abandoned; average hold time; average call length; and many more. You’ll also be able to easily export data to your favorite spreadsheet format.
Consider Implementing “Spillover” Queues
The strategy of “spillover” or backup queues can help prevent your staff from being overwhelmed with Black Friday or Cyber Monday calls. These additional queues will receive any excess calls that aren’t answered and will pass them to a second group of agents standing by for this contingency.
Use Your Phone Service Provider’s Web Interface
If your business has more than one product or service, you may benefit from keeping separate phone numbers and call queues for each. This can keep call volumes manageable by ensuring customers are getting to the correct department. Use your cloud-based phone service provider’s Web interface to ensure that each product or service has a unique phone number, pointing to a call queue staffed by appropriately trained agents.
Announce Approximate Wait Times
Finally, it’s always a good idea to announce approximate wait times. Your shoppers may or may not be patient enough to tolerate a reasonable hold time, but if they are going to wait on hold, be sure you give them a rough idea of when they can expect to reach an agent. This feature is easy to implement in your provider’s web interface.
By following these simple steps, you can rest assured that your call centers will be prepared to deal with the rush of customer requests, and ultimately, run smoothly this holiday season.
Adam Simpson is the CEO and co-founder of Easy Office Phone where he oversees the creation of new sales channels including a North American Dealer Program, plays a leading role in software development, manages the company’s network infrastructure, and builds dedicated teams of sales, support and engineering staff. Under Simpson’s leadership, Easy Office Phone has grown rapidly and steadily into a highly respected provider of Hosted PBX service to clients throughout Canada and North America since its launch in 2005.
