6 tips for handling customer service during the holiday rush

💡Answer frequently asked questions with a flowbot

Let’s face it. Your agents can’t be around all the time. Who will handle customer inquiries at 2 am Friday morning? Or respond to customer emails on the weekend? In most cases — no one!

Thanks to chatbots and flowbots customers don’t have to wait for responses from live agents; they get immediate responses to their inquiries.

In Trengo, you can create your own flowbot and teach it everything it needs to know.

Flowbot helps you find the information your customers need quickly and easily. The bot will ask them a few simple multiple-choice questions to understand what they're looking for. Once they've chosen their option, it'll provide the requested info right in the chat. It's that simple.

Check out frequently asked questions last year during the holidays. Are they about shipping, cancellations or returns? Then simply fill in the questions and add the right answers to the bot. The more variations of a question you provide, the smarter it becomes and the more accurate its answers will be.

You can also design the flowbot to figure out when customers need to be forwarded to a specific team or team member. The bot recognises the customers by the answers they give and know exactly when they have to be forwarded to the customer service team.

“Using Flowbot can significantly reduce your team's workload, ultimately saving valuable time for both your team and your customers.”- Daryl Sanches, Team Lead Support at Trengo

📚Read more: Betersport set up a Flowbot to help to answer frequently asked questions. In Trengo, you can easily create your own bot without any knowledge of coding.

💡 Automate repetitive workflows with rules

Dragging emails to the right folders, forwarding emails to the right colleagues, setting ticket results, and so on. Routine and repetitive work consumes a significant amount of time for your team. That's why automation can be very helpful, especially for highly complex tasks like data entry or sending mass emails that are prone to human error.

Rules will help you automate your workflows, ensuring your team avoids unnecessary manual work.

For example, a team member is responsible for labelling all incoming emails from 5,000 customers. Rather than manually labelling each email, the team member could automate the entire process by categorizing each email using specific keywords in the email. That’s time, effort, and resources saved.

Rules consist of conditions that trigger a specific action.

So instead of repeating tasks, you can automate the entire process by creating your own rule.

Here are a few examples of workflows you can automate in Trengo:

• Add labels to conversations
• Add SLA to conversations
• Send messages to customers.

⭐️Set up this rule in Trengo

The holiday season is a wonderful time, but it can also be stressful. It can be particularly challenging for your customer support team. They may not be able to respond to queries as quickly as usual. However, instead of leaving your customers waiting in the chat, you can use rules to inform them about the increased response time.

You can copy the following message and then set up the rule in Trengo:

"Currently, our chat is a little busier than usual. That's why we can't answer your question as fast as we normally do. We’re trying our best to get back to you as soon as possible. If you don't want to wait, we can also answer your question via email. Wishing you a merry Christmas and an amazing new year."

💡Establish a system for organising emails using labels

For all types of companies dealing with a large customer base; it’s normal to receive hundreds or even thousands of emails daily.

In this case, using a system will automatically sort incoming emails into specific categories based on priority, relevance, and other internal criteria.

For example, you can set up a system to filter emails based on ‘customer tag number,’ ‘customer name,’ and ‘subject line,’ then send to their respective folders and label them accordingly.

Pro trick → Labels are essential, especially in categorising your emails. For example, emails labelled “Action Required,” “Review,” “Important Notice,” or “Urgent Notice,” should likely be prioritised.

Labelling messages will also provide useful insights. Because in the reporting tab of your team inbox, you can check these label insights.

📚Read more: Parfumado’s support team was 30% more productive by using Trengo's automation solutions.

💡Set up quick replies

Your team receives a large number of customer queries during the holidays. But because there are always hot topics and frequently asked questions, these conversations won’t all be different. So, instead of typing the answers to FAQs over and over it’ll be easier for a team member to click, pick the right answer and send it.

Using quick replies makes your life easier in multiple ways:

• They improve your response time
• They save your customer service team time
• They make it easier to keep a steady tone of voice as a team

How do you set up quick replies? → Check out this easy guide.

💡Provide self-service with a Help Center

Customers nowadays often prefer self-service over live support. They want to find the answer to their question as quickly as possible, without having to rely on an agent.  By building a Help Center at all times, you can enable your customers to help themselves. You can create articles on frequently asked questions and make the Help Center accessible on your website or in your website widget.

✨Did you know that you can create your own help center in Trengo? It's a great way to ease the burden on your customer support team.✨

💡@tagging colleagues

When you’re having a conversation with a customer, it is important to quickly get to the bottom of their issue. Sometimes a team member will know the answer immediately. However, more often than not, they will need help from a different team or team member to resolve the issue.

@tagging feature in Trengo makes it possible to get help from colleagues quickly. Below any customer conversation, team members can @mention each other and discuss the matter internally to find a solution - all without troubling the customers.

💡Assign conversations to specific teams or team members

Is there a question about orders or one about invoices? No need to go through all messages individually. Assign them straight away to the right team by using automation. The right team member with the know-how on this specific topic can pick it up and respond fast. This ensures customer queries go directly to the person responsible for handling them.

💡Use workload balancing

Workload balancing will help you equally and automatically distribute the workload among the members of your team, based on what every member of the team can handle. As conversations are distributed automatically, it ensures that every customer gets helped and everybody has their fair share of challenging questions.