The holiday season is incredibly busy for retailers, with many doing as much as 80 percent of their business for the year during the fourth quarter. Retailers, whether they are online-only stores or have brick-and-mortar locations, must plan carefully to ensure they are ready for the surge that comes in the fourth quarter. It is the period that can make the difference between a good year and a bad one, solidify or ruin your reputation among customers and establish an outlook for the new year. With so much at stake, retailers need to be at their best, something that isn’t easy considering the headaches that come with the latter portion of the year.
Three of the greatest headaches associated with the holiday season are:
1. Everybody is busy
Your shipping partner is more swamped than usual. Your customers are in a rush to have everything purchased and on their doorsteps before whichever holiday they celebrate. Your employees scramble to keep up with customer demands. The roads are crowded with extra traffic, making it take longer to go anywhere. Add it all up, and you’re left with a situation where there might be just enough time and energy for your organization to get by if everything goes right. However, you’ll inevitably end up struggling to keep up once even small problems and customer complaints come into play.
Automation can help alleviate this burden. In particular, aligning your customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems with your website systems can play an instrumental role in accelerating operations. Integrating these systems with your website can:
- Keep product inventory and supply levels updated in near real time to create constant visibility into what is available, what needs to be ordered and what you won’t have enough of to meet any new demands.
- Automatically update data across disparate systems to protect your users from having to spend valuable time on data entry or copy and paste tasks that prevent them from being able to focus on value-related processes.
- Bring together supply chain, vendor management and purchase orders to ensure users have relevant information at all times. For example, an associate researching a shipping problem won’t need to jump from an invoice to a purchase order to a shipping manifest, as the data between those disparate documents can be integrated into a central list of updates on the order in the ERP.
These are just a few ways that ERP and CRM systems can allow for basic process automation and documentation when integrated with your website, creating greater visibility across the organization and allowing your workers to focus on the most important tasks.
2. Nobody wants to be there
In general, people would rather be out enjoying the holidays and not working. There are exceptions to this rule, but keeping your workforce engaged during the holiday season can be incredibly challenging. The key here is to plan ahead to make the actual holiday season as painless as possible. Customer orders are going to come in at a high volume. Web, social and mobile traffic is likely to rise. Special promotions and the nuances of shipping times will become especially important to consumers. All of this adds up to a great deal of stress placed on your workers as they scramble to keep up with customer demands.
It can be incredibly gut-wrenching to work tirelessly and scramble day in and day out to help other people enjoy the holidays. Keep your employees happy by preparing for the rush so they don’t have to deal with quite as much stress when the busy season kicks into gear. Getting your site ready for the holiday season’s demands can limit the problems your workers will must contend with by ensuring a smooth end-user experience. Some actions to take leading up to the holidays include:
- Running a site performance test to identify how your ecommerce platform performs under different loads and identify any issues that should get fixed before the holidays.
- Analyzing the links placed throughout your site to ensure they go where they should and don’t leave users stuck with errors and a difficult time finding what they need.
- Revisiting your search engine optimization strategies to make sure potential customers can get to your site easily from search engines.
- Connecting with your shipping suppliers early on to ensure they are ready for extra volume and that the communications between your site’s backend and their systems work properly.
- Ensure your site is ready to handle mobile users just as well as web visitors.
Preparing your website for the holidays can set a foundation for success when the holidays strike by ensuring your employees do not need to spend time putting out operational fires and can instead focus on value-related tasks. This can make work less hectic and help your teams stay more engaged through the busy season.
3. Customer service requirements ramp up
All of this hustle and bustle and the surge of sales associated with the holiday season often means organizations end up facing more customer service requests than usual during the period. Making strategic website improvements – be it through data integration in the backend or ensuring good performance – can be invaluable in that it prevents customer service problems from arising in the first place. However, these actions are not a panacea. You still will likely have plenty of calls and emails coming in as the holiday season wears on. A few ways to deal with these challenges include:
- Deploying self-service tools that allow users to perform simple tasks, such as password resets, without having to reach out to customer service.
- Implementing bots to provide automated responses to users in real time, allowing them to get immediate help without having to wait for support personnel to be available.
- Rolling out remote access to help and service desk tools so your users can work more flexibly and respond to customer problems without having to be at a specific workstation.
- Investing in tools that convert emails into service desk tickets to eliminate manual sorting and processing.
- Hiring temporary workers to handle low-level customer support tasks.
Customer service must be a priority in the holidays, as a few bad reviews can easily lead to major reputation damage if they end up on social media or trusted third-party retail sites.
The holiday season comes with plenty of headaches for ecommerce companies, but a combination of careful planning and technological innovation can streamline day-to-day operations and position organizations to get ahead of the sales surge that comes in the fourth quarter.
Make sure your site won’t cause any unwanted headaches this season with our holiday health check.
