To assist support teams as they prepare for Black Friday, Ultimate hosted a digital event on how to proactively plan your support strategy for the busiest time of the year.
In case you missed it, you can watch the recording or read on for a few key insights.
Every business has a peak season
For many companies, we’re heading into the most critical part of the year. According to Adobe Analytics, total peak season revenue generated in 2022 hit a record-breaking 211.7 billion dollars. So while your business will likely see a surge in sales, your customer service team will also encounter consumers who’ve never interacted with your brand before and an increased amount of inquiries.
To help you scale your operations, here are a few practical steps you can take — both with automation and more broadly — to prepare your business for peak season.
Step 1: Listen to your data
Your company is sitting on a treasure trove of data: the thousands of conversations your agents have had with your customers over the years. Manually sorting through this data to extract insights is nearly impossible, but AI can export it instantly. By listening to your historical data, you can take a look at what happened during last year’s peak season and learn from it.
Our CS Automation Explorer allows you to leverage your past support requests to make data-driven decisions by:
- Clustering repetitive inquiries into topics
- Providing insights into automation potential
- Allowing you to easily build out intents
Find out more about clustering
Step 2: Build customer-focused flows
Sometimes, when companies approach automation, they aren’t focused on building solutions that will be helpful to their customers.
“Often companies look at how they can cut costs and increase the bottom line, but we should be asking: How can we use automation to help customers have a better experience?”
- Mike McCarthy, Head of Sales, Ultimate
With Ultimate’s no-code Dialogue Builder, you can help customers get information to solve problems faster, target high-impact inquiries first, and assist human agents in getting all the necessary information before they take over from your virtual agent.
Step 3: Approach automation in phases
Creating a world-class automation experience doesn’t happen overnight. As with any tech implementation, it’s important to start with the highest impact areas that are easy to automate in order to get it up and running before your peak season.
Once you’ve started with automation and developed a realistic idea of what can be automated, improving your bot and building long-term solutions becomes easy.
“When it comes to bot management, the best talent is often right on your team. Our no-code Dialogue Builder is meant to be owned and operated by customer support teams.”
- Alyse Andre, Mid-Market Sales Lead, Ultimate
Learn from 5 top brands who scaled their support with AI to handle peak season with ease.
How to get your virtual agent working before peak season
If you adopt automation now, you could be handling peak season like a pro in no time. Take a look at a few of our customer case studies and their success with automation during peak season.
If the last year has taught us anything, it’s that unprecedented volumes of inquiries aren’t always foreseen. When Covid-19 hit in March 2020, Finnair’s query numbers shot up by 600-900%, but thankfully they were able to build on established automation processes, maintaining premium customer support without missing a beat.
Not only will customers appreciate the ease and efficiency of automation, but your agents will thank you too. Fonecta, a leading provider of digital marketing services, implemented chat and saw the volume double in the first 4 months, going from 600 to 1,200 conversations a month. Thanks to Ultimate’s solution, Fonecta is set to save 2,000 hours of agent effort, freeing up agents to work on more rewarding tasks.
Peak season for ecommerce companies is coming up soon, but every industry has its own peak season to prepare for.
With the annual lead-up to Black Friday, it’s a always good idea to get ahead of the curve.