Scaling for Support Request Spikes: 5 Ways to Thrive During Peak Season

"Oh, the joyful holidays, we’re really looking forward to them this year!" Said no customer service department ever. That’s because for the vast majority of support teams, dealing with the peak season support surge can involve staffing woes, too much work to handle, and huge drops in customer satisfaction. Which is a problem for everyone, because customers will bail on a brand that's not providing the stellar, speedy support they expect: 80% of customers report having switched to another brand due to poor customer service.

But you don't have to dread the holiday season. Here are 5 ways to prep for peak season with the most up-to-date trends and tools. 

1. Compare ROI for outsourcing vs. automating vs. doing nothing

Support centers usually mull over three strategies to weather the holiday season: Outsourcing or temporarily growing their support team, trying to make do with extra effort and no extra resources, or relying on support automation tools. Which one of the three makes the most sense for your business depends on a range of factors. They can include  your industry, markets served, support team size, annual volumes, agent salaries, and channels served.

But all companies can compare ROI for each strategy based on a few simple parameters. 

For example, if you know your annual CRM costs and support volumes, you can calculate your current cost per ticket. Compare that with the cost per ticket if you recruited and trained seasonal temps (higher staffing costs), outsourced your support entirely (higher operational costs), or automated a certain percentage of your requests (investment costs). Then, compare that with the potential revenue loss from customer churn if you decide to skip the extra investment and risk backlogs and unanswered tickets instead.

You can also plug your annual volumes and agent hours into cost savings calculations to find out if outsourcing, staffing temps, automating, or doing nothing, would save the most money for your business. 

Curious about calculating automation ROI? Watch our free webinar on measuring automation results on-demand here.

But remember: with customer expectations higher than ever, short-term cost-cutting shouldn't be your only concern — especially if that means CSAT will suffer. Read on for ways to make support interactions between your team and your customers a joy for everyone involved.

2. Give customers more opportunities to self-serve with the help of automation  

If, after mulling over the options laid out in step one, you are interested in opting for automation, there are some promising developments to consider. Thanks to breakthroughs like generative AI — the tech behind the notorious ChatGPT — you can automate your chats while still maintaining an uncannily natural, human-like conversational style. This way, you can provide customers with more options to self serve on common queries like completing a purchase, shipping status or locations, or around returning an item — while still giving them the feeling of conversing with a human agent.

Pro tip: With AI-powered software like UltimateGPT you can immediately start using chat automation with a bot that is trained on your own help center or knowledge base — seamlessly matching your brand tone of voice, customer language preferences, and more. This way, you can hit the ground running during peak season — without increasing the demands on your existing customer support staff.

Discover how 5 top brands used AI-powered automation to prepare for peak season. 

3. Use proactive messaging to set expectations during peak season

By getting strategic about how you approach CX automation, you can make your support team's lives even easier during  peak season. For example, if you know from your customers’ past shopping behavior that certain products tend to quickly run out of stock (smart speakers around Black Friday, USB fans in the summer months), you could work on proactive messaging around that — and alternative product suggestions while you're at it!

For example, when they experienced an issue with recognizing their customers' IP addresses, B2B SaaS platform ActiveCampaign proactively sent out verification emails, as well as building a corresponding chat flow that led their customers through the verification process. This helped them soften the blow of a disruption to their service for customers while also deflecting 24% of inquiries related to the issue.

Hear it straight from ActiveCampaign's Director of Global Enablement, who shared their success story at our recent event.

Managing expectations works both ways: If you give your customers a heads up that it might take a bit longer for your team to reply or process their order in these few weeks, they might be more forgiving. 

Read more about the customer support best practices that successful SaaS companies like ActiveCampaign are implementing.

4. Minimize peak season stress on your support team. Really.

Research has shown a clear link between agent satisfaction, customer satisfaction, and increased revenue: In an industry notorious for its high turnover rates, making sure employees are happy and engaged benefits everyone, especially during holiday season. In the longterm, offering regular training and setting up paths for career development can do wonders for agent morale and productivity. And particularly around peak season, it's important to focus on short-term relief, whether that's making sure to have an extra open ear for any issues that arise, or automating mundane & repetitive CS support tasks like ticket routing.

Whichever additional strategy you choose to face increased volumes — having a team on board that’s able to think clearly and support each other will pay dividends in more ways than one. 

5. Avoid duplicate tickets by rapidly routing requests to the right rep 

One of the biggest challenges support teams face during sudden support spikes is ticket duplicates: When impatient customers don’t immediately get an answer on one channel, they might ask the same question on another one, creating two separate tickets, or cases, for the same issue.

The easiest way to avoid ticket duplicates is to make sure that no matter what, customers receive instant first responses to their questions. One way to do this is to level up your manual triaging game: if questions immediately reach the right rep, you save time otherwise spent moving that ticket from department to department. An even more bullet-proof way to avoid duplicate tickets is to install a ticket automation tool, which can not only route requests to the right department using AI, but can also create, auto-populate, solve, and close tickets within seconds. It’s how Lush achieved a 60% first contact resolution rate — while simultaneously maintaining a 93% CSAT score.

Everyone loves the holidays, but not if they mean losing control of your brands’ customer experience. With the right strategy, a proactive approach, and the necessary CS and automation tools in hand, your team no longer needs to dread that special time of the year — and your bottom line will thank you for it, too.