How Can eCommerce Brands Plan For Peak Seasons?
Managing peak periods in eCommerce is challenging with traditional methods like overtime or temporary staff often proving inadequate. Yoummday addresses this by combining advanced planning, a flexible talent pool, and AI-driven processes to ensure businesses can efficiently handle busy seasons while maintaining high-quality customer service.
One of the biggest challenges for eCommerce and retail brands is the peak periods during the year when orders are coming in so fast that it becomes difficult just to fulfill them all - let alone handling the huge volume of customer service enquiries.
It’s very hard to manage these peaks with an internal team. All you can realistically do is cancel vacations and ask the team to work more overtime. Some companies may bring temporary customer service agents on board, but this requires training and onboarding just to manage the peak season - it’s a real challenge.
Companies that are working with an outsourced partner may find that they have similar problems. Their partner should be able to find new agents from other projects that are not struggling through a peak, but the reality is that even a customer experience (CX) specialist can struggle.
This is why the yoummday approach to managing peak business periods, such as eCommerce brands planning for Black Friday, is different. We combine planning and flexibility to ensure that even these busy times of the year can be managed comfortably.
• Planning ahead: eCommerce brands already know most of the peak periods, they are not a surprise, but we can take transaction data from previous years and use it to predict future volumes. This helps when planning IT infrastructure and headcount requirements for the peak season - use data-driven insights to plan ahead rather than just hoping for the best.
• Building a talent pool: build a team of talents (our term for agents) who are prescreened and trained and ready to go. You can build a bigger team of trained talent than you need during regular business periods and just call on more people as the peak season arrives. The important thing is to build that bench of talent so they are ready to go when peak season arrives. Your team is ready to scale up when needed.
• Using a decentralized and adaptive talent pool: working with talents located anywhere allows you to find the right people, even if they are not located near to your business. They can be onboarded and ready to go, and can even be on different time zones to add additional coverage. This wide community of talent leads to recommendations from inside the team so it can organically grow larger and stronger. Yoummday currently has over 15,000 talents onboarded in over 100 countries using 35+ languages.
• AI: every customer service specialist talks about the possibilities of using artificial intelligence (AI), but we are already using it to improve services for our clients today. Our processes use AI across three main pillars - increasing efficiency, enabling better service (for example, automating manual processes), and creating new business through greater insight. AI is a reality, not a possibility.
This is how to build a structured and flexible approach to managing your eCommerce business through the peaks that are approaching in Q4. Look around at the traditional advice in customer service journals and they are still talking about how many customers are prepared to wait a long time for service and how many customers will accept poor service… This is no longer acceptable.
Why not move on from these negative strategies, which focus on damage limitation, and build a flexible and adaptive customer experience process that can easily help you through the peak season?
