When inquiries explode: how to master peak season in online retail
Nobody needs an explanation of what peak season looks like in retail. Everyone knows the endless lines and crowded stores at Christmas. That's why, for many people, the holiday season means one thing above all: stress!
But it's not just retail that has to prepare for peak season – the transport industry is also under heavy strain at this time. Sometimes several million parcels have to be shipped per day. And e-commerce companies have to rely on this overloaded system too.
Because e-commerce companies also experience peak season. In addition to Christmas, summer sales, Valentine's Day and Easter, there are individual events throughout the year that lead to more customer inquiries as early as a week before and then to higher sales. Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Amazon Prime Day are peak season days when many e-commerce companies can barely keep up with their customers' inquiries.
For your e-commerce company, these days are not only an opportunity to increase your sales, but also to win new customers and turn them into regulars.
When is peak season, anyway?
One of the longest peak seasons starts on October 31 with Halloween and only ends at the end of January, when the return period closes. E-commerce companies in particular are under heavy pressure from inquiries here too. Questions about where an order is or its status, complaints about the product or questions about returns alone take up a large part of your customer service team's time.
The two highest-grossing days for e-commerce companies also fall within this period from October to January. About 90% of the highest-grossing days in e-commerce retail fall in the fourth quarter of the year. Cyber Monday is the busiest day worldwide, with four times as many sales as an average day of the year.
How can an e-commerce company prepare for peak season as well as possible?
With good preparation, it's possible to get through peak season without burning out. Below you'll find some tips and tricks to prepare as well as possible and go into peak season with peace of mind.
Staff planning
As in retail, your team can be understaffed. Counter this with realistic staff planning. Base it on experience from previous years, and if you don't have that, ask for the assessment of your employees who actually deal with customers and their inquiries. What team size do they work best with, and when did they recently feel they needed more support?
If you hire seasonal staff, you have to make sure they're well prepared for peak season. Proper onboarding is essential for consistently good customer service.
Sometimes it isn't possible to hire more staff. Then you can turn to technical solutions and support your team at peak times with a chatbot. It takes over a large share of inquiries and absorbs the flood of messages.
Your regular employees can also benefit from training or refresher courses. Short seminars on topics such as "Countering stress at work" or "Dealing with difficult customers" can work wonders for your employees' well-being.
If you're not sure whether your customer service is fit enough for peak season, take the test here.
Prepare your website
Make sure all the discounts and offers you've planned for peak season are ready. When do these offers start? How long should they run? How prominently should they appear in the store?
Pay special attention to improving the product descriptions on your website. The more precisely and accurately you describe your product, the lower the risk of a wrong purchase. At the same time, it helps you avoid returns that need to be processed again.
Optimize self-service
If you want to ease the stress of peak season for your employees, self-service gives you the opportunity. Younger generations in particular prefer to solve their problems themselves, and if you give them the right tools, they become well-advised customers who never even need to be passed on to your service team.
The first step is updating your FAQs. Ask your customer service team for advice. They deal with customers' questions every day and can tell you which topics were most often unclear. You should definitely add these topics to your FAQs.
Technical solution
One of the best ways to ensure solid self-service is to implement a chatbot. It can quickly clear up your customers' most common questions in a personal conversation, and depending on how well it's trained, it can even take on more difficult inquiries. That lets your customer service team focus on revenue-generating inquiries. It can handle routine inquiries such as order status, canceling an order or changing a delivery address, taking the load off your customer service team. In the following example, you can see how your bot can answer a question about order status:
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Our whitepaper AI in e-commerce gives you an overview of the possibilities your own chatbot can offer.
And while a chatbot looks after your customers in direct conversation, melibo's Ticket Automation handles all other support requests. Your email support tickets can be sorted by urgency and then forwarded to the different service agents through smart ticket routing. The AI can go by who currently has capacity for more inquiries, so work is distributed evenly and individual agents aren't completely overloaded. Or you let the AI assign tickets to your agents based on expertise: simple inquiries go to seasonal staff and specialist conversations go to the experts on your team. Our CTO Jonas explains how melibo's Ticket Automation works with practical examples:
Check capacity
Before peak season starts, you should first check whether your website can handle the increased traffic. Nothing is more annoying than a crashed website or abandoned checkouts just because demand was too high.
Second, you should check your warehouse capacity and make sure it's optimally sorted and stocked, so orders can be processed and shipped to your customers as quickly as possible.
Forto has summarized how to get your logistics ready for peak season here.
What to do during peak season?
First of all: don't panic. You've prepared yourself and your employees well for everything, and you'll pull it off. But now isn't the time to let up. Your customer service team is especially in demand now, and this is your chance to win new customers over to your company and turn them into regulars. How? With excellent customer service and good communication.
24/7 support
Many customers now expect their questions to be answered around the clock. Shopping with e-commerce companies in particular no longer sticks to normal working hours. This kind of support is simply impossible to deliver with human staff alone. That's why it's a good idea to implement a chatbot before peak season.
Customer experience comes first
A chatbot can also make your e-commerce company stand out when it comes to customer experience. It can highlight discounts and offers for your customers and advise them directly on your website with a built-in product advisor. Once your customers have chosen a product, your chatbot guides them through checkout, preventing purchases abandoned out of frustration. It can also remind your customers that items are still waiting in their cart. That lets you increase your sales even further.
The only bad news is no news
You might not want to admit to your customers that their order will take longer after all. It can feel like failure on your part. But not communicating it is the biggest mistake you can make. Many customers are very understanding about delays, especially since everyone knows that retail and e-commerce are overloaded in peak season and in an annual state of emergency.
It only gets annoying when, for example, a company promises a delivery date and then the package doesn't show up. Everyone will understand that being told something will arrive later than expected is better than the disappointment of not being informed about the delay.
You can prevent many questions about where an order is by providing regular updates on order status. That keeps your customers informed and takes the load off your customer service team, who don't have to deal with order information requests.
After peak season is before peak season
Get feedback
Use your customers' fresh experiences and ask them for feedback. How do they rate the store's performance, and how satisfied are they with your customer service? Where is there room for improvement?
Once you've identified weak points in your e-commerce company's performance, you can take steps to fix them. Feel free to communicate these improvements to your customers too. Show them that their criticism is taken seriously and that your company is constantly working to improve.
Document the strategies that proved themselves during peak season and make sure you share them with the employees in your company.
Returns, returns, returns
Here too, communication should be an important part of your strategy. Keep your customers up to date on the status of their return by sending them regular updates. You can automate these regular updates with your chatbot, so they don't create extra work for your customer service team.
Your chatbot can also help your customers with complaints, providing return labels and the return itself. Every inquiry it intercepts isn't forwarded to your customer service team, letting them work as stress-free as possible.
By making sure your returns management is planned and carried out effectively and efficiently, you can stand out positively from your competitors and turn new customers into regulars. Customer centricity can also help you win more regular customers – read our blog article on it here.
A stress-free e-commerce peak season thanks to optimal preparation
With the right preparation and technical support, your peak season can be as stress-free as possible. You can prepare your staff, your website and your self-service for peak season and make sure communication with your customers doesn't break off along the way. Afterwards, you have the chance to collect feedback and make improvements for next year. Here too, keep communicating with your customers so new customers can become regulars.
A chatbot can support your e-commerce company optimally in every phase of peak season. Whether it's informing customers about the status of their order or return or answering questions directly on your website, it can become the bridge to your customers and at the same time the buffer your customer service team needs so it isn't swamped by small, time-consuming inquiries.
But an AI-powered chatbot can do much more for you. For products in the cart, it can recommend better but more expensive products for upselling or show related products for cross-selling. It can also let your customers know when a product in their cart is on offer together with another product. That way you can keep increasing your sales rate every peak season without any extra effort on your part.
You'll find more information in our whitepaper "Stress-free customer service in peak season 2024".
