During the holiday season, call volumes can spike unexpectedly for many businesses. Whether you are an online retailer whose website crashed due to Cyber Monday traffic, a video game publisher with an unexpected best-seller, or a shipping company trying to cope with a condensed holiday season, being able to manage fluctuating call volumes is imperative to ensuring customer satisfaction. Thankfully, with our cloud contact center software, you don’t need to worry about scaling your contact center quickly and efficiently.
Contact center managers know that it’s difficult to accurately forecast call volumes. In 2008, our client, Activision, experienced an unexpected surge in holiday call volumes due to their acquisition of the popular video game franchise “Guitar Hero.” November-to-January customer service calls increased from 7,700 to 85,000 in just two years, leaving them unprepared. However, these volumes weren’t sustained past January, so it didn’t make sense to invest in hardware that would sit idle for the rest of the year. Instead, they leveraged our cloud ACD technology to scale efficiently while maintaining the flexibility of inbound and outbound agents.
Holiday call volume spikes can also be caused by website troubles. Every year, there is at least one major retailer who experiences a website outage during Cyber Monday. This year, the victim was Motorola. In response to their widely published Cyber Monday deal for Moto X phones, users flooded their site to cash in. The company was undoubtedly hit with a flood of customer service calls. With a cloud contact center solution, Motorola would have been able to seamlessly route calls to both inbound and outbound agents, increase their number of contact center seats, and manage the crisis with ease.
Finally, companies who deal with shipping logistics always have a difficult time during the Holiday season. Due to Thanksgiving falling late this year, American shoppers have the fewest shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas since 2002. While gift-givers scramble to complete wish lists, shippers like FedEx and UPS are expecting an 8% increase in peak season daily volume. For UPS, this means that the company will hire more than 55,000 seasonal staffers to help manage the load of both shipping presents and handling customer service calls. With a cloud contact center solution, shipping companies won’t need to invest in extra hardware or headcount—they can leverage the cloud to automatically shift outbound agents to handle inbound calls, and add and subtract seats according to demand.
Without the ability to scale efficiently during peak holiday call times, your contact center’s customer experience can suffer dramatically. Whether you currently utilize a premise solution that is costly to scale quickly or cloud technology that can’t automatically shift inbound and outbound agents, contact us today to learn more about our cloud contact center software.
