The world is just a few days away from Christmas.
Christmas vibes are an awaited ‘experience’ for everyone throughout the year. People love to drown in the smell of freshly baked gingerbread and delightful views of lights and decorations everywhere.
So, customers are already in a joyful mood and getting a great experience naturally. But Christmas shopping is the inevitable part contributing to the overall Christmas experience.
Now, this experience is in the hands of retailers and store owners.
Perks of Offering Delightful Experience in the Christmas Season
As we know, a tremendous positive customer experience always opens excellent opportunities for a business to improve its bottom line. And they can convert random new customers into loyal customers.
When there is a rush of customers during this time, unprepared stores will find it difficult to manage and treat customers individually. So, every retailer must be prepared to avoid dissatisfying a single customer during this rush season.
Christmas and the overall holiday season lead to many upselling and cross-selling opportunities. If you market effectively by understanding the fundamental customer requirements and needs, people will upgrade their plans and buy more items.
For example, when a customer buys a Christmas tree, you can recommend the matching decor items to them as a cross-selling.
If your restaurant provides great Christmas meal packages for busy families, you can give loyalty points and offers to get upgraded with premium meal packages.
Also, offering attractive offers, free gift wrapping, overnight deliveries, express shipping, etc., make new customers choose your brand. If you keep the quality in their overall experience by assigning more staff to deal with them personally, it will help them to convert into loyal customers.
A ‘Joyful’ Christmas After 2 Years
A peculiarity of this year’s Christmas is that we celebrate it luxuriously after 2 years of pandemic restrictions and concerns. So, there will be new trends in the customers’ buying preferences.
The main shopping areas where people spend more are gifts, decorative items, apparel, and food. Since there are many gifting service providers and people can even place orders online without visiting shops, there are no concerns over convenience now.
Even though many online shopping and eCommerce stores are open for customers, some people like store visits at Christmas since visiting shops is indeed an experience. The aesthetically decorated stores and shopping malls are visual treats for them.
There is a change in the trend of customers gifting these days.
People like personalized, thoughtful gifting and focus on value for money when purchasing gifting goods, even if they rush into last-minute shopping and overnight gifting solutions.
But, this leads to a nightmare for retailers.
Since there are many more customers to manage at these times, brands might struggle to give a unique and personalized experience and effective holiday customer service to all customers. And this will result in a drastic drop in customer satisfaction.
Example
As per the customer experience analysis in the chocolate industry, it was found that the sales of chocolate were relatively higher in December, but at the same time, it gathered more negative customer attention during that time than ever before!
There will be many new buyers apart from your loyal and regular customers. They will be buying from you for the first time, and if they get a negative experience in the customer journey, especially with a gift they sent to their friends and family, they will be very frustrated.
Chocolate is one of the most popular gifting options for family members, friends, and the corporate world. So people will consider it as an easy gifting option without thinking much.
But as per the report, many people got melted or broken chocolate, and people complained that they saw much larger bars of chocolate on the online store page and received smaller sizes. The delivery package was not proper, etc.
Here, the chocolate brands know they will have a surge of customers in the holiday season. So they must be prepared to manage the orders and hire more temporary employees to manage the packing and delivery well.
Also, customers do not like false information. Providing the exact picture and details about the products' size and flavor will help avoid more negative customer experiences.
So, the main tip for retailers is to market what they offer, be prepared to manage the large customer audience, and try to provide an experience that meet customer expectations.
Let’s check a few tips to offer a delightful customer experience this holiday season.
Tips to Provide a Joyful Shopping Experience to Customers in the Holiday Season
The top 5 tips a brand should consider to prepare themselves for the Christmas and holiday season are:
Let us check these tips in detail.
1. Establish a Clear Customer Experience and Service Plan
As already mentioned, there will be more customers, and so do customer complaints and queries. To manage them, the entire business and their operations need to be prepared even before the holiday season.
To get a better idea of the preparations, you can check the previous years’ data, like how many customers were there in an hour, whether the staff managed them well, and through which support channels customers connected more.
The main areas you need to plan are the working hours and the channels customer interactions happen more.
You can keep the working hours as usual and focus on other best practices to improve customer satisfaction during the holiday season. But, for better management during peak times, you need to define fixed business hours to ensure the staff's availability.
Customers will connect through multiple channels with which they feel comfortable. They may try to contact you online, through social media, live chat, or visit your physical store.
If there are too many customers, the staff won’t be able to manage everything simultaneously. So, you can keep some channels closed. This will be better than not responding to customer queries. Or, if you do not need to miss any customer communication, you can encourage them to connect to your chatbot.
Leaving a chatbot to communicate with customers in real time will help reduce dissatisfaction from unanswered customer messages. Or, as mentioned before, you can hire temporary employees to manage more customers.
2. Use Data & Insights from Last Year's Christmas Sales
Creating a holiday strategy won’t be a waste of time because it will help measure the results and be very useful for the coming year.
To prepare a clear and efficient strategy for this year, you need to check the data and insights from the previous year.
Insights around the customer density, holiday customer service, performance of the support team, when the rush began and when the crowd went back to normal, how many customer queries were received, and which was the main area of concern will help to get an idea of the preparations and where you need to put extra focus this year.
Check the peak time of customer rush, whether you need an extra business hour, and in which aspect your customer service team had to take so many calls, for example, regarding delivery, package, app experience, etc.
It's not easy to manage customer expectations. Going through the insights with the help of a customer experience analytics platform will help you to get a clear idea of this and even check raw customer reviews and feedback in a single place.
So, understand customer expectations from the insights, ensure you offer those expectations, and surprise customers this holiday season.
3. Train your Staff to Assist Customers Effectively
Holiday customer service is a crucial factor in the customer experience. First, ensure your customer service team is enriched with knowledge about all your products and services and capable of resolving customer issues as soon as possible without reconnecting with other support team members. Otherwise, it will increase the response time, and customers will get angry.
As this is the time customers send gifts and give surprises to their loved ones, if something goes wrong with the products, especially in gifting, it will frustrate them, and they seek quick resolutions. In such scenarios, the front-liners must be patient and efficient to solve them calmly one by one.
There will be a lot of queries, and the customers might be regular or new. To help them quickly, agents need to access customer data in real-time. Knowing the current products customers are viewing, their purchase history, the complaints and support requests they have raised before, etc., will help agents to reduce the response time.
Handling customers through live chat will help agents to connect with multiple customers at the same time. And giving callbacks will help increase customers' trust since, during the holiday season, the call traffic will be higher.
Providing pre-holiday training to all employees will be very effective.
4. Ensure Precise and Open Communication with Customers
Clear communication will reduce customer complaints to some level. If you are planning for any change in timing and your stores are planning to open on weekends during this holiday season, communicate it clearly with customers. You can send them in an email or display them on your website.
Furthermore, sending emails around special offers to your regular customers will help them know about your offerings and improve the retention rate.
Let customers know when the customer support team will be available, how long the delivery will take, the unpredictable delays in the shipping process, etc.
Keep updating your FAQ sections frequently if there are any changes in the business operations. Also, redirect them to detailed KB articles to allow them to resolve the problems by themselves proactively.
5. Set Up Robust Self-Service Facilities for Customers
Self-service is an emerging trend as it allows customers to help themselves. This solution will be very useful when there is a staff shortage to serve customers during rush hours. For that, your website must be enriched with all the information customers need to resolve their concerns with the purchase from your brand.
So, ensure the content on your website, articles, blogs, KBs, and FAQ sections are updated on time and cover all holiday rush-related concerns and their solutions.
In addition, you can take the extra mile by implementing virtual assistants for customers. Adopting a top-notch and technologically advanced AI-integrated live chatbot will be an advantage in assisting customers effectively and quickly.
The quick solution implies higher customer satisfaction.
Have a Joyful Christmas!
Christmas brings happiness to everyone. It’s a time of surprises, gifts, and delicious Christmas feasts. As a company, if you can take customers' happiness with your product and services to the next level by making their shopping experience smooth and delightful, your customers will stick with you for a long time and will return to your store even after this holiday season and the great holiday rush.
So, be prepared to make your customers happy and give them a holly jolly experience during the purchase journey and post-purchase.
Merry Christmas!
Read - 5 Tips For Creating The Best Black Friday Customer Experience