Christmas has changed. More and more people are avoiding the high street, preferring to buy online or over the phone. While front and back office staff do their best to manage the increased workload, IT staff are under pressure to protect huge volumes of data and avoid security breaches.
Ensuring adequate staff to manage higher volumes of calls is paramount to the customer experience. Moreover, it shows you value their time. Extensive queues, on the other hand, raise the stress levels of everyone concerned. Both employee and customer engagement tend to dip when the burden of Christmas shopping hits your business.
Rather than employing a large amount of seasonal staff, which takes up time and resource, you could be utilising your communications technology to give you a helping hand. Oak has put together a few tips to help you manage the Christmas period.
Automate routine tasks
Integrated systems assist staff to adhere to policy and avoid mistakes. Process automation speeds up customer verification and database look ups. Staff are less stressed and better able to focus on providing a great service, even during the busiest periods.
You can even include payment automation to save on staff costs. By utilising technology, callers wishing to simply make a payment can opt to use the automated system rather than hold on for a member of staff.
Review PCI DSS compliance
Following recent improvements to online and face-to-face card transaction security, fraudsters’ attention has turned to phone payments.
Using manual pause and resume recording when customers give their card information over the phone is likely to lead to mistakes. At best, time will be wasted. At worst, it could lead to a serious data breech which could have a huge impact on your business. With Christmas being the busiest inbound period of the year, this is not something you likely have the resource to dedicate to.
Provide regular security training
Frontline staff should be informed about current fraud tactics and be able to identify a suspicious calls or emails.
