By Rob Mead, Head of Strategic Marketing, Gnatta
- Boost team morale
As positive as your team is on a typical working day, the pressures of peak season can cause morale to dip. While it’s expected for this to happen once or twice when things are extremely hectic, your team shouldn’t be experiencing longer periods of low morale.
When your customer service team has collectively high morale, productivity will be at an all-time high. So to keep spirits up, retailers should establish meaningful rewards and incentives to let them know that their hard work is valued and appreciated. Vouchers, awards for achievement, and days off for high performance can all be offered by retailers to help teams work productively and more positively towards goals.
You might also want to consider improving the work environment, from more comfortable chairs and wrist supports to unexpected treats from senior management – in some companies, it’s been known for the CEO to personally tour the office with tea and cakes to boost everyone’s mood during peak periods.
- Offer customer-centric service
Retailers rely on customers during peak season, which is why it’s so important to work towards a customer-centric approach. By creating a strategy that focuses on continuously putting the customer first, you’re more likely to boost loyalty, retention and sales during this time. Customers should feel important to the retailer they’re purchasing from, which your team can achieve by taking an empathetic approach to issues or concerns and offering the easiest, most efficient solution. This can often mean implementing self-service options and using multi-channel communication to allow customers to get information however and whenever they want.
Having a strong goodwill scheme is necessary, as some element of service failure is inevitable. Equip customer care staff with plenty of information to help diffuse and resolve situations, such as providing them with discount codes, or the ability to authorise a scheme that means no return necessary on damaged items below a certain value.
- Carry out a health check on your website
From improving search engine optimisation (SEO) on your product and category pages to updating FAQs, the importance of checking site health increases tenfold before peak retail season. Your site should be completely fit for purpose, which means it should be checked for issues or potential areas for improvement well ahead of time. Consider carrying out a bit of mystery shopping – open up an incognito window on your browser and explore your site, from buying something, testing discount codes and starting a web chat. Not only will this ensure that the customer experience is seamless when peak season rolls around, but you’ll also be placing your business ahead of the competition with targeted copy and keywords that help you rank high on the top search engines.
