You can expect that the Christmas season is a busy time for retail stores. Sales increased by an average of 3.6% – 5.2% during November all the way to December. This generally results in having a tricky period for customer service.
To keep your 24 Hour Answering services secure these holidays, get an Inbound Call Center Philippines. But how do you ensure that your call center partner will be an effective investment during the holiday season?
The most effective way we make sure we are ready to take that influx of calls is by mimicking real-world traffic and call volumes or also known as automated load testing.
Here are four questions we start with to prepare your dedicated answering service for different time zones ahead of peak volumes.
BPOs are basically made up of the number of concurrent calls it takes and the IVR call flows.
For instance, if a client needs to handle 1000 simultaneous calls, they should at least have more than one data center.
If you run a load test with us, we can help you find if there are any of your data centers that are not delivering calls to our agents.
Customers make constant changes to their IVRs. This is because it’s important to make sure their IVR will perform even under load.
As IVR develops, some go from DTMF to speech and there are different functionalities that customers add. Come peak season, IVRs will again have changes to accommodate the overflow of customer calls.
Another key element in preparing after-hours call center services for SMEs in the coming peak season is dedicatedly monitoring it. This helps you identify issues even before the customer does.
Our proactive monitoring means that our agents would send a test call every 15 or 30 minutes. They then report back if there are any issues with that IVR call.
Potential problems that we commonly experience are dead air, jitter, packet loss, or calls that fail to connect.
These things create a bad brand image. On the other hand, repeat calls may have an impact on the bottom line for the call center.
Planning ahead of peak times is key to a good test strategy. Moreso, it also proves to be essential when it comes to providing a great experience during peak season.
For retail or travel SMEs, you could anticipate calls starting to ramp up during the October-January period. With this expectation, you can prepare months ahead.
But a good test strategy is not only essential for industries that are affected by the holiday rush. It’s also important for other industries all year round.
It’s always important to ask yourself, “Is there an event that could trigger an influx of calls?” By having the answer, we can help create a good test strategy to make sure everything’s working as it should.
Christmas bells have already started ringing. There are some businesses in which the holidays will get started.
But hiring more people in your team doesn’t always mean that you’ll have the ability to accommodate the flood of calls. You need to balance out technology with the headcount you currently have.
Even with 58% of retailers investing in technology to help manage holiday call volume spikes, it’s better to outsource overall. You don’t need to balance out anything because we can do that for you. And as for the questions above? We can also answer all those and more.
Just contact us here and we’ll give you the answers!