Getting Through the Contact Center’s High-Volume Season with Ease

With Black Friday and … dare we say it in October… Christmas just around the corner, large enterprises and their contact center operations are getting ready for peak season. But contact centers don’t just serve the retail sector, they also provide services to financial institutions, healthcare providers, and hospitality to name a few. What does peak season look like for non-retail sectors? And more importantly, how can contact centers get through their high-volume season with ease?

Defining Peak Season to Avoid Disruption

Retail operations typically see the most activity between November and January and therefore need to fill positions and train employees starting months before. For other industries, peak season can change. In hospitality, for example, the peak season is both summer months and the winter holidays. For everyone else, Call Center Studio recommends a forecasting exercise to determine when call volumes are highest, although tracking call data is necessary to do so effectively. By analyzing past call and chat data, contact centers can identify historical peak seasons, predict future influxes, and avoid disruptions.

Disruptions have the potential to send a negative shockwave across the contact center. Shyftoff explains that: 

“seasonal spikes are turbulent, unpredictable, and can overwhelm even the most experienced operators. The surge not only puts immense pressure on agents but also demands meticulous planning, training, and real-time decision-making from the operations and management staff.” 

Typically high-volume seasons expose weaknesses in contact center operations, Shyftoff says, and can lead to negative repercussions like:

• A culture of reactive and higher-stress operations
• Having untrained staff answering customer questions
• Decreased customer satisfaction
• Increased costs
• Higher levels of agent burnout
• Higher levels of attrition

To avoid the peak-season pitfalls, Fusion CX recommends making a step-by-step plan four weeks ahead of time. The plan should look something like the following:

Devise a plan well ahead of when it needs to be executed in case any hiccups arise along the way. To go beyond the plan, let’s look at some key strategies to get through contact center peak season.

Try Gig CX to Staff Up

It goes without saying that an increase in customer queries means contact centers will need more agents to respond. ICMI recommends hiring at least six months in advance of high-volume periods and with consideration for seasonal workers. To shave off weeks in the process, consider a HiringBranch assessment that can cut 90% of hiring time. If your contact center does tend to staff up seasonally, try reducing the seasonal staff onboarding time and giving these agents only easy customer calls. Save the complex queries for full-time staff who are fully trained.

In some cases, it just isn’t possible for contact centers to find enough staff on a regular basis, let alone during peak season. It is in response to the growing number of these cases that the “Gig CX” model has emerged. This is a novel response that may equip seasonal lulls with higher-performing agents. Shyftoff explains:

“Talent shortages are pervasive, quality is low from inexperienced hires, and the cost to ramp up agents with traditional hiring methods is costly. This is where a GigCX model comes into play. Workers in a gig economy have a different set of preferences and priorities than a traditional workforce. …Gig-based agents value autonomy, they are more independent, they like variety, hold themselves accountable, and are high-performing.” 

In addition to potentially better-performing agents, contact centers can save money by using gig workers, and scale as much and as quickly as they’d like - 10, 100, or even 1000 agents!

Technology and Training Will Go A Long Way

As contact centers take on new staff resources and try new technology they are forced to ramp up training and testing. Call Center Studio shares eight tips to help prepare for peak season, and these are two of our favorites:

• Train agents to handle increased call volumes with scripts, training tools, and QA
• Use technology like call routing, chatbots, and automated callback systems to improve the customer experience during high-volume periods

To take this advice further, Call Center Hosting advises teams to focus the adoption of new technologies on systems that relieve call volume. That means going beyond chatbots and callback systems and using social media updates, SMS support, interactive voice response systems, having rich FAQs that are accessible on the website or support site, and using multiple channels for support.

Extend Service Hours To Spread Out Queries

In addition to multiple channels for support, more agents, and more technology, contact centers can prepare for peak season by extending service hours. This has the potential to spread out the customer queries that are incoming, making the total load more manageable. The reduction in calls during peak hours also means agents will be able to give better service.

Since agent resources may already be limited and/or stretched during peak hours, contact centers should be wary of extending hours if it will lead to additional employee burnout. Just Call recommends ensuring that all overtime hours are generously compensated, giving employees extra breaks on long shifts, giving extra vacation days within peak season, and offering incentives to agents who perform exceptionally well during peak hours.

Crunch Time Can Be Fun

Peak seasons can sometimes be unpredictable - like an influx in calls stemming from a technical outage, a PR disaster, and even a natural or socio-economic disaster. Contact centers should have a plan for these types of unplanned peaks. 

Fortunately, seasonal peaks are typically due to holidays, annual events, product releases, and/or important company news. Contact centers should not only prepare for these peaks using the advice above, but they can even have a little fun too. Blue Ocean recommends branding this peak season with names like “Operation Save Thanksgiving” or “Holiday Hell 2024.” A fun and lighthearted theme can make the peak season less painful while building a team culture of resilience. At the end of the day, contact centers have to embrace peak seasons because they’re inevitable.

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Image Credits

Feature Image: Unsplash/Anna Dziubinska

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