6 Ways to Avoid Communications Meltdown This Holiday Season

Install call queuing — Queues are a powerful tool for handling calls in an orderly and efficient manner. Call queuing allows you to distribute calls to multiple staff members as calls arrive, and will also hold calls in priority sequence if all agents are occupied. You can easily change which agents belong to a given queue, and even offer call preference to your top performers using skills-based routing.

Broadcast approximate wait times — Assume that your shoppers are not patient enough to tolerate a reasonable hold time. Be sure to provide them with a rough idea of when they can expect to reach an agent. This feature is easy to implement through your phone service provider’s Web interface.

Consider “spillover” queues — Anticipate that at some point your staff will feel overwhelmed by the flood of customer calls. To alleviate this challenge, a spillover or backup queue will receive those excess calls and pass them to a second group of agents who are standing by as contingency.

Set target service levels — Responsiveness is critical during peak shopping periods. Determine an optimum response time, and the target service levels feature will report how frequently your targets are actually being met in practice.

Use tracking and reporting tools — Use deep tracking and reporting tools to understand how your contact center teams are performing across a wide range of metrics, including areas for improvement. Remember to make these evaluations in advance of the busiest days so you can make any needed adjustments without added pressure. Metrics can include total number of calls, how many calls were answered versus abandoned, average hold time and average call length. A good tracking and reporting suite will enable you to easily export data to your favorite spreadsheet format.

Have a fallback plan — To cover the unlikely scenario that no agents will pick up in time, ensure that queues ultimately terminate in a mailbox with an appropriate greeting. Upon reaching this mailbox, customers should hear a recording that assures them their calls will be returned within a certain time frame. This mailbox should be constantly monitored, and any messages within should be responded to promptly.