Holidays are coming ready to turn yet another chaos into a growth prospect?

Having Black Friday and Cyber Monday only just left us, winter holidays are right around the corner, leaving no time to rest for the brands to get into the last and maybe most decisive battle, as to whether business has closed with a plus or a minus in the year.

It will be a tougher holiday season than most for companies to maintain good CX, with retailers under pressure and, as a result, delays from order time to delivery and Customer support too, as customer service agents will need to deal with more irate customers than during a more normal holiday shopping season.

Retailers, beware of these 10 CX dangers this Holiday season!

Amongst many, one thing is also for sure, that nobody wants an uneasy customer journey along the hectic weeks to follow, so here are a few things that retailers must make sure to be extra careful of:

1. Make more time for your people

   Customer order inquiries (WISMO) reach up to a third of customer inquiries and they can really come at a great cost to the business. Bringing more value to customer experience with CS automation that will take this load off is an absolute necessity.  Automation solutions such as Pobuca Experience Cloud that use conversational intelligence can save up to 40% of your CS agents’ answering time and provide your customers with real-time, round-the-clock, chat-bot-assisted Customer Support.

2. Then, make sure to have empowered them

   It doesn’t matter so much what the customer issue might be, as much as to empower your CS agents to take all the needed actions to resolve it on the spot. Make sure to incentivize your CS teams to go for first-call resolution, empowering your people to change delivery dates, refund or replace orders according to the customers’ preferences.

3. Grow revenue from your CS

   By taking WISMO out of the equation through an AI CX solution as the Pobuca Experience Cloud, your agents will have more time for quality work that can generate revenue, further increase their lifetime value (CLTV), and grow the brand, leaving them also with more time to bring to the table really insightful conversations with the customers on things that they really care.

4. Adapt to the seasonality

   The nature of customer interactions varies throughout the year from season to season. Plan your CS agent’s training accordingly, and adapt to diversified customer requests throughout the season. The right interaction solution that automatically detects and adjusts to changing customer needs for the majority of the WISMO interactions is a must, leaving your human agents with plenty of time for more complex customer interactions every season.

5. Be always there for your customers

   It’s all about a seamless, all-around user experience, driven mainly by smartphones and handheld devices  being at the same time enhanced with social interactions with friends and family. Being always available, not only in your traditional customer-facing touchpoints but also in social channels like Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Whatsapp is the only way to make this right.

6. Personalize

   The most powerful customer interactions are those that are both personalized and proactive, with customers being twice more likely to engage in messaging when the brand initiates a conversation, and average order value almost doubles up when customers chat with a brand before purchasing. Don’t forget that each and every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to represent the brand, establish rapport, and earn new business. Industry leaders today should be seeking scalable ways to have more interactions with customers across their journey and empower customer experience teams to go beyond reactive support and become proactive, personalized brand ambassadors.

7. Provide Full Agent Support 

   In this – hopefully-  last year’s holiday season of the Covid- era, the retail industry is certain to face a vast volume of inquiries with fewer voice agents than in previous years and this is why it is so crucial for call centers to provide additional training for seasonal agents to effectively manage their increased loads, maintain high-quality interactions and generate positive resolutions…

8. Improve Agent Training

    It is very critical to CX the importance of the human touch, While chatbots have removed fundamental interactions to improve service, efficiency, and costs, you should not think of removing the human touch overall. Direct calls are up from 40% in pre-pandemic to almost 60% of interactions currently. This is why you should further focus on empathy in agent training. If the agent can empathize with the disappointed customer, it helps diffuse issues early, leading to better CX and trust. 

9. Get Ahead of Returns

   It is absolutely critical for retailers to be able to provide an easygoing, seamless return experience for shoppers and a CX automation solution as Pobuca Experience Cloud, can help by collecting and analyzing customer data to predict likely returns based on the order itself. Secondly, a robust full order lifecycle automation solution also allows you to provide more engagement with an individual customer, including real-time on-demand updates on return shipping and refund processing that they’re able to access on their channel of choice.

10. Being there for your customers 

helps them trust you even more, while it is good to know that customers that engage through chat with a brand through chat are almost 3 times more likely to make a purchase…Measure – Measuring customer experience with Voice of the Customer metrics fails to help you manage journeys and measure overall experiences, especially as survey fatigue is growing. Leverage a journey-based approach and use customer journey analytics to optimize your CX measurement program by setting your priorities, using the right CX Metric at the Right Point in the Customer Journey, pinpointing customers’ preferred touchpoint/best time, assessing the right behavioral metrics, and monitor Experience Metrics in Real-Time and Over Time

The Holiday season is never a walk in the park for retail and brands. Sustaining a good CX may not be the only thing on your list, but making sure that you will do your best to sustain a good CX throughout these very demanding weeks and, why not further improve it, might be one of the most critical steps for your business’ growth and resilience.