Delivering Excellent Customer Support During Peak Times: A Strategy for Business Continuity
A guide on how and why it’s essential to choose the right partner to support your during peak times
As the holiday season is approaching, companies start to plan the season peak time to deliver seamless customer support with no long wait times, delayed responses or frustrated customers.
During peak times, even the most efficient in-house customer support teams can become overwhelmed. To avoid this, many companies strategically opt for outsourced support which is both flexible and scalable helping but equally maintain service quality and consistency across every interaction.
How outsourcing support during busy times can benefit your business and what are the key factors to look for in a partner?
Understanding and acknowledging the need for outsourcing during peak seasons
Every business faces spikes and fluctuations in customer enquiries: for example, retailers and gift card providers can experience spikes during celebrations along with travel card providers during the busy holiday season. These busy periods can create temporary high volumes that are hard to manage just with internal resources.
Stats show nearly 62% of financial institutions outsourced operations to reduce operational costs and enhance digital service efficiency in core processes.
(Business Research Insights).
Research
An important step after acknowledging that your business needs support in dealing with peak times is research. Looking at your business needs and customer needs, what each outsourcer offers, what kind of business models are they already dealing with and what are the key services to match with your needs.
Multilingual Customer Support
Always focus on your customer needs. If you have a global customer base, make sure you deliver customer support in the languages they speak. This will lead to a quicker resolution as customers can fully understand the message and terminologies in their own native languages.
Multi-channel support solutions
At the same time, an outsourced provider who offers customer support via multiple channels will support in efficiently dealing with customers queues in peak times. Equally, it will increase customer satisfaction as they can choose to communicate via the channel they prefer.
Outsourcing is often considered an enabler that help businesses to quickly scale their customer service operations to match these spikes without compromising the quality and customer expectations when they reach out for support.
Key benefits of outsourced customer support in peak times
- Flexibility – outsourcing teams provide access to highly trained agents who can manage high volumes as needed, all while providing seamless customer support.
- 24/7 coverage – make sure to find a partner is able to operate across multiple zones or is flexible enough to provide support based on your requirements.
- Technology stack – A reliable partner should offer a complete and integrated technology stack. This ensures that they have access to the right tools, platforms, and frameworks to deliver seamless, scalable, and secure customer experiences to your customers.
Business Continuity
A trusted outsourcing partner can not only handle peak time pressure but also provides operational resilience. For example, if internal teams/in house teams face disruptions such as staffing shortages or tech issues, outsourced partners ensure interrupted customer support keeping operations running smoothly, and without affecting customers.
Insight and Reporting
An added value benefits an outsourcing partner should also provide is real-time insights and analytics. This should include:
- Insights from customer interaction – to better understand the pain points, gaps in product offerings and common issues to address them.
- Volume trends and forecasting – what are the contact drivers and what customers are expecting and adapting to their needs.
These insights will help your business refine strategies and improve service delivery both in the short and longer-term.
