As the holiday season draws near, it’s time to start thinking about how your business will handle the seasonal web traffic bursts that come with online sales. This time of year, customers are scrambling to find holiday gifts, and thousands are turning to the Internet to do their shopping.
Of course, this means more and more people are — or will soon be — scouring the web for basement bargains and Black Friday blowouts. If you plan on making it through the holidays in one piece, you have likely already started thinking about options for handling this increase in web traffic. Here are five ways to do it with a cloud contact center.
First, What’s a Cloud Contact Center?
Wouldn’t it great to be able to turn to and rely on a tech-inspired platform that will allow you to deliver top-notch customer service? Cloud contact centers can help companies like yours to support customers seeking answers or clarification to any number of issues via a host of channels, including live chat, voice, texting, and social media.
With these solutions, you can track any customer’s activity and keep a log of it to access anytime. This helps streamline the brand experience by giving customer service agents ample information — enough so that the customer doesn’t have to repeat the same information over and over again. Instead, the live agent with whom they’re speaking can simply access the customer’s record and determine why the customer is calling in the first place.
1. Cloud Bursting
As the calendar nearer to Black Friday and beyond, you’ll want to have assurances that your online store can handle increased customer demand. Fortunately, you can put systems like cloud bursting in place to meet peak demands or free up resources for business-critical needs.
Cloud bursting allows an application to run in a data center or private cloud before “bursting” into a public cloud platform when the demand for computing capacity spikes, which is especially true during peak holiday seasons.
Indeed, cloud bursting is well-suited for retailers that experience a boost in online traffic during the busy holiday shopping season. Thus, if you’re thinking about this as a solution to handle spikes in web traffic, be sure to consider any pertinent regulatory and security compliance requirements.
2. Efficient Forecasting Strategies
Many companies rely on forecasting to determine the level of demand for each holiday shopping season. In order to be sure they can handle the demand, companies use machine learning (and other methods) to forecast demand. Using this information, they test their systems to ensure the demand won’t be too much for their network to handle.
3. SaaS Contact Center Solutions
If you plan to implement tech strategies to handle heavy web traffic throughout the holiday season, you’ll need to equip yourself with the necessary tools to handle such a task.
In particular, a SaaS contact center solution may be just the answer you’re looking for, especially if you want to stand out amongst the competition and give your customers the online shopping experience they desire (e.g., transactions that are fast, easy and personally tailored to meet their needs).
A SaaS contact center solution works for small to medium-size call centers and places an emphasis on customer service by helping to improve customer issue resolution rates, expand debt collections and bolster sales.
4. Speeding Up Online Transactions
To provide customers with the best possible online experience, you need to deliver your products and/or services quickly and efficiently.
After all, no one wants to sit there staring at their computer screen for five agonizing minutes, waiting for the next page to load when they’re trying to get their shopping done quickly and easily.
By using cloud-based content delivery networks, you will reduce the need for server maintenance and provide your customers with a seamless mobile app and website experience.
5. Customer Engagement Platform
A customer engagement platform can help you clear any obstacles that often divide departments and fragment workflows. With the right customer engagement platform, you can focus on interaction management to see the exact level of engagement a particular customer has had with your business using shared real-time and historical reporting.
During web traffic bursts, a customer engagement platform helps simplify the customer experience by allowing for self-service capabilities like IVR.
Paving the Way for a Hassle-Free Holiday Season
After seeing how cloud-based call center technology can help your business navigate the upcoming and busy holiday season, you can trust that the technologies mentioned above will help simplify and improve customers’ overall brand experience during these busy times. Consider implementing one or more of these solutions to manage web traffic bursts that will likely pave the way for a hassle-free holiday shopping season.