Is Your Call Center Ready for the Holidays?

The holidays are officially upon us, which likely means your call center is preparing to handle an increased volume of inbound calls, texts, form submissions, and chats from customers over the next couple months. At the same time, your sales and service teams may be stretched thin by time-off requests, shortened operating hours, and seasonal illnesses. Have no fear: our comprehensive workflow tools can help you handle all of these challenges, keep customers happy, and glide through the holidays with ease.

Read on for tips on how to best meet the demand and needs of your customers during the holidays with CallTrackingMetrics.

Anticipate your staffing needs using past Activity Reports.

Staffing your call center with the right number of people over the holidays doesn’t have to be a guessing game. With CallTrackingMetrics you can generate Activity Reports for the same time period over previous years to help determine how much inbound contact volume you should anticipate for this year.

Plotting out your expected volume is the most reliable way to help ensure you have sufficient staffing resources. For a little more certainty, you can also review your Agent View for past holidays to verify the number of agents you had staffing your call center, and then check the Status View to see how the team actually performed on those days. To get even more granular, switch to the Hour View to map out your team’s performance on an hour-by-hour basis.

Set up special holiday routing and voice menus.

If your office has reduced or changed hours, make sure to update any schedules you may be using to control your call routing. To make things even easier, you can build alternative holiday routing for a specific date without having to make changes to the everyday system. Build simple rules to ensure callers are routed properly on holidays and get everything set up in advance so you’re not scrambling to make reactive changes the day of.

Our team also traditionally sets up a special voice menu for the holiday, so that callers can hear the most up-to-date information on our hours and availability, and quickly be directed to the best resource for their particular issue. You can use Smart Routing to route callers to specific teams, like sales or support, or employ Sticky Routing so that callers automatically go to the last person they spoke with, ensuring continuity of conversations and providing a better support experience.

Empower your team to work from home.

Whether you’re experiencing inclement weather and your staff can’t get into the office, or your agents will need to work on actual holidays, it’s a great option to give your team the tools they need to work from home. You can change your call routing to send calls directly to home phones or cell phones, or use our built-in softphone for agents to answer calls right from their computer.

Stay on top of activity while on the go.

If you are still operating and answering calls on the actual holidays, you fortunately don’t need to be tied to your call log every moment of the day to stay on top of activity. Take advantage of email and text notifications so that you’ll know within moments if you have a missed call or a new voicemail message.

Check in on your activity log while you’re away from the office by visiting your CallTrackingMetrics account on your mobile device, or install the mobile app (available for both iPhone and Android phones) for more mobile-friendly browsing.