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12 Steps to Prepare Your Zendesk for the Holiday Season 🎉

The holiday season is a busy period for businesses, and it's essential to ensure that your customer service offerings and teams are well-prepared to handle the increased demand. To help you make the most of Zendesk during the holiday season, here are 12 essential steps to prepare your Zendesk for the festive rush.

This article will cover the following topics: 

  • Review and Update Knowledge Base Articles
  • Optimise Self-Service Options
  • Implement Automated Workflows
  • Update Business Hours and SLAs
  • Train Your Support Team
  • Enhance Multichannel Support
  • Monitor and Analyse Historical Data
  • Promote Proactive Communication
  • Scale Your Zendesk Plan if Necessary
  • Set Up Holiday-Specific Macros
  • Implement Customer Satisfaction Surveys
  • Update Talk Greetings for the Holidays

📘 Review and Update Knowledge Base Articles

Before the holiday rush, review and update your Knowledge Base articles. Ensure that they are accurate, comprehensive, and cover common holiday-related queries. This can help reduce the volume of incoming support tickets. Examples of this might include creating or updating existing articles to cover the following topics:

🔍 Optimise Self-Service Options

Encourage customers to find solutions on their own by optimising self-service options. Customise your Zendesk Help Center, update FAQs, and promote self-help resources. This not only improves customer satisfaction but also eases the burden on your support team. This may include the following:

⚙️ Implement Automated Workflows

Leverage Zendesk's automation features to streamline workflows. Set up automated triggers, macros, and ticket routing rules to prioritise and categorise holiday-related queries efficiently. This might include the following examples:

  • Setting all order-related requests to a high priority via a trigger
  • Configuring existing triggers to account for a holiday schedule
  • Configuring a pending ticket notification workflow.
  • HOT TIP 🔥: We highly recommend implementing a Pending ticket notification workflow. This will automatically send ticket reminder notifications to your customers without the agents intervention to follow up.

🕒 Update Business Hours and SLAs

Adjust your Zendesk Schedule to ensure your business hours reflect holiday schedules along with any closure dates. Confirm if your Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are still accurate or update accordingly; this might involve shortening or lengthening your SLA first reply time during the holiday period to cope with increased demand for example. Managing customer expectations regarding response times is crucial during the holiday season. 

🚀 Train Your Support Team

Provide refresher training to your support team on Zendesk features and any updates made specifically for the holiday season. Ensure they are well-equipped to handle increased ticket volumes and are familiar with any temporary changes to workflows. You can access the free Zendesk training available at training.zendesk.com or via the quick links below:

🌐 Enhance Multichannel Support:

The holiday season sees an influx of customer enquiries through various channels. Ensure Zendesk is integrated with all relevant communication channels such as email, chat, and social media. This ensures a seamless customer experience regardless of the channel used. Zendesk has the following built-in social media channels:

  • Public Channels: Facebook (for public wall posts), X (formerly Twitter)
  • Private Channels: WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE, Facebook Messenger, X Direct Messages (formerly Twitter), Instagram DM
  • A TikTok integrations are available via 3rd party apps 
  • HOT TIPS 🔥: 
    • We highly recommend that you link your social media channels to the web widget; this will allow your end users to start conversations via the Web Widget and continue them in the social channel of their choice.
    • For more information on how to configure this see: Enabling Customers to continue conversations through social channels
    • If you require to be able to manage all types of Instagram messages from within Zendesk you'll need to utilise a 3rd party app from the marketplace to achieve this. 

📊 Monitor and Analyse Historical Data:

Analyse historical data from previous holiday seasons using Zendesk Explore. Identify patterns, common issues, and peak times to better allocate resources and improve overall efficiency. Some things to look for are: 

  • Review peak times to ensure you are adequately staffed to manage increased demand. 
  • Review data from past years to see what ticket types were trending and make sure you've accounted for those
  • Review Help Centre data and see what search queries return 0 search results and ensure an article is created to plug any knowledge gaps. 

📢 Promote Proactive Communication:

Use Zendesk to proactively update customers on any potential delays, special offers, or changes in services during the holiday season. This can help manage customer expectations and reduce the likelihood of unnecessary support requests. This can be as simple as creating a new outbound ticket to let the customer know of the update before they even reach out to you. 😉

⚖️ Scale Your Zendesk Plan if Necessary:

Evaluate your Zendesk plan and consider scaling up if needed. Ensure that your Zendesk plan can accommodate the increased ticket volume during the holiday season without compromising on performance. You may need to consider scaling up your Zendesk plan if you require any of the following: 

  • More features! If you want to get more out of your Zendesk, the Zendesk Enterprise plan (or any plan higher than your existing plan) gives you access to all features (excluding paid add-ons). Check out the Zendesk Plan comparison page here. 
  • Advanced AI: The all-new and mighty Advanced AI add-on is now available for all Zendesk accounts.
  • Advanced Data Protection and Privacy: Know your data is safe! Protect all of the information inside your Zendesk safely and securely with the new Advanced Data Protection and Privacy add-on. 

🔧 Set Up Holiday-Specific Macros:

Create holiday-specific macros to expedite responses to common queries. These can be especially helpful for repetitive tasks and can save valuable time for your support team.

🌟 Implement Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Collect feedback from customers using Zendesk's satisfaction surveys. This will help you identify areas for improvement and gauge customer sentiment during the holiday season. Check out the Zendesk articles below to get your CSAT in tip-top shape:

 

☎️ Update Talk Greetings for the Holidays:

Enhance the customer calling experience by updating your Talk greetings with custom greetings for the holiday period. Share warm holiday wishes, set a positive tone for customer interactions; as well as the expected closure period (if there is one).

By following these 12 steps, you can ensure that your Zendesk is well-prepared to handle the increased demands of the holiday season. A proactive and well-organised approach to customer support during this time not only enhances customer satisfaction but also contributes to the overall success of your business. 🌟

What to do after the holidays? 

After successfully navigating the holiday season, it’s crucial to review the actions taken and identify areas for improvement. For insights on how to reflect and enhance your processes, check out our guide: Reflecting and Implementing Improvements Post-Holiday Season.

 

Need assistance? SuccessCX are here to help. Set-up a call with our expert team now at https://www.successcx.com/contact/

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