4 Best Practices for Seasonal Communication
The holiday season is upon us as we are getting bombarded with Christmas marketing, Black Friday ads, and all the email promotions your inbox can handle. Inc.com reports that holiday sales are expected to exceed $1.1 trillion between November and January. While many retail businesses experience increased foot traffic into their locations, others have gone online, so the increase comes in the form of phone calls and internet orders. These businesses struggle to keep up with orders, listen to customer problems, and have the staff to support this seasonal peak in volume.
In the Business-to-Business world, this season can be even more challenging as employees request additional time off to be with family or have long weekends, they use up their vacation days before they lose them. Others want to relax at home after a long year of travel. The problem is the business is still open, calls are still coming in, and customers are still trying to reach your representatives to do business. In today’s digital business world, clients and customers are not just taking the month of December off and will get back to you in January.
Don’t get me wrong everyone needs a break, but how does this affect the business owners and managers that have a desire to provide exceptional customer service all twelve months? How do you let customers know your store hours have shifted to close around the holidays? What about seasonal businesses like hotels in Branson who close their doors for January and February?
Do you just let all your calls go to voicemail and will call them back in January or March when you get back to business? By that time, they might be doing business with your competitor that answered the phone.
What are the best practices for seasonal communication?
1) VOICE OVER IP and HOSTED PBX PHONE SYSTEMS ARE A MUST HAVE
Why does your phone system matter? It’s just there to pick-up the call, play them the auto-attendant menu of options, and send them to the right extension. My job at Motion VOIP allows me to sell many national VOIP providers such as Vonage, RingCentral, net2phone, 8x8, and Kerauno. I can point out many great features for each of them, and I can also show you why one fits your business better than the next. The one thing they ALL have in common is they all allow you to easily make changes to incoming calls during the holiday season and back when it’s over.
SOLUTION: A hosted PBX solution will give you access to a web portal that will allow you to do the following:
Adjust your auto-attendant to your holiday hours so your getting calls when you are open and clients are not getting an open message when you are closed (many allow you to schedule this in advance)
Adjust IVRs to reroute calls to present employees for ones that are off for a couple of days - how great would it be if a live person would still be able to answer the phone
Setup call-forwarding to allow you to get your office calls on your cell softphone app so you can get some Christmas shopping in without missing a call. They call your office, and it rings on your cell - no one knows you are at the mall picking up a last-minute Christmas gift.
Change your auto-attendant message to a Holiday Greeting message with a company like snaprecordings who will do a professional recording for your system
Voicemail to Email allows you to take calls on your time. When someone leaves you a voicemail at work, the VOIP system will change that call into an email with a wav file attached. Next time you check your email you click the message, listen to the call and click the number if you want to call them back (which you can make look like your office number with the softphone app)
Our partner Kerauno has developed probably the easiest way to make these adjustments with their drag-and-drop controls in their web-based portal. It makes it so anyone can change your call routing without needing a technology degree. Call us today if you want a free demo of how easy their system is.
2) POST YOUR HOURS ON YOUR WEBSITE
It is one of the most missed items, as many businesses don’t spend much time each month (or each year for some) in updating their web pages. If your business is one that has foot traffic like a restaurant, insurance office, or retail location, then this is a must-do. Your customers may how you are closed on Christmas, but what about days you are closing early or extra days you are giving off like New Years Day?
3) SOCIAL MEDIA - Post to ALL your channels
The first concept you must embrace is one size does not fit all. What I mean by this is a simple post to Facebook is not enough to target everyone in your business world. With the overabundance of social channels that we use today, it has lead to a segmentation of individuals. I am not going to bore you with all the numbers, but let’s say a white male business executive in his 40’s and a 22-year-old female fashion student may not use the same social networks to communicate.
SOLUTION: If you don’t have a full-time social media employee, you MUST make a list of the social networks you are active in. For most businesses, this will be Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Simply login and post your holiday hours to each of them. For some of you, this might be an excellent opportunity for your clients to see you using that neglected social channel.
4) EMAIL AND TEXT BLASTS TO EXISTING CLIENTS
Email and text messaging are great ways to both communicate your seasonal hours and wish them a Happy Holiday at the same time. If you are using a CRM such as HubSpot, SalesForce, or ZOHO, you have invested the time and money in building a list of existing and potential clients you communicate to throughout the year. If you are not using a CRM, put together a list in Outlook or Gmail.
SOLUTION: Spend a couple of minutes, sending out emails or text messages to targeted segments of your CRM. I suggest you take a couple of extra minutes and personalize it to each group. An example would be to send different communication to long-time clients vs. new clients vs. prospects. I would send a message such as this to long-time clients:
Dear Craig,
During the holiday season, I am always so grateful that I am to be able to provide for my family by assisting great customers like yourself with technology and Voice Over IP solutions. As our business continues to grow, I want to make sure you know that I appreciate you trusting in us year after year. This time of the season, we also want to show our employees appreciation allowing them to have a family life outside of our business. To do so, we have made some minor changes to our hours of operations during the holiday season. Here are our temporary hours:
CHRISTMAS EVE: CLOSED
CHRISTMAS DAY: CLOSED
NEW YEARS: CLOSED
CONCLUSION
Although these ideas are all pretty simple to understand, I would bet over 50% of all businesses forget at least one of them and other companies forget most of them. Excellent social communication, sending personal emails/texts, and not letting your customers get lost in the auto-attendant dead zone are all ways you can provide exceptional customer service. It comes down to these basics:
Get your business on a VOIP or Hosted PBX system (great little company names Motion VOIP can help you with that)
Update your website with holiday hours to make sure no potential clients miss you
Send out Social media posts to ALL your channels to communicate with both existing and potential customers
Email and Text your current customers to show them you appreciate their years of service and are not just chasing new business.
Happy Holidays from the entire staff at Motion VOIP!