November 14, 2023

Addressing interaction traffic influxes in contact centers during the holiday season

During a recent interview, Nick Delis, the Senior Vice President of International and Strategic Sales at Five9 spoke about how contact centers can effectively address interaction traffic influxes that occur during the holiday season.

The holiday season is a lucrative but tough time for many businesses, particularly in relatively busy sectors like retail, travel, hospitality, and even insurance.

Addressing the inevitable influx of interaction traffic into contact centers during the holiday season requires prompt action to address the challenges faced by each of the core stakeholders of CX—the customers, the agents, and the broader business.

Challenges to key stakeholders

Even at times of massive interaction traffic, customers expect instant service to be delivered. Delivering on this requirement is key to maintaining a good level of CX delivery for customer satisfaction.

Apart from that, one of the major complaints from consumers when dealing with companies is the inconsistency of the service experience. This can either mean inconsistency within a single channel, or across multiple channels and even inconsistencies between the e-commerce experience and the in-store experience.

As for agents, the biggest challenge is the need to adapt to the massive influx of interaction traffic while also keeping up-to-date with changing consumer preferences. Businesses need to work extra hard to offer agents access to the right tools, including omnichannel capabilities, so that a stellar customer experience can be delivered.

In terms of the overall business, unpredictable external pressures can be a massive challenge, especially during the holiday season when demand tends to be extremely high. 

Real-time data is key to addressing these challenges

Regardless of the stakeholder, customer, agent, or business, the availability of real-time data is the key to resolving these challenges.

While businesses have already taken steps to address a majority of the predictable challenges that come with the increased interaction traffic influx of the holiday season, what really needs to be addressed are the unpredictable ones.

This can range from unprecedented product demand changes in the retail sector to weather changes that affect travel and hospitality businesses. Either way, access to real-time data is crucial to addressing them.

Solving customer requirements like the need for instant service and consistency of service delivery calls for businesses to have relevant data in hand immediately. Contact centers must be optimized through features like bulk operations processing and automation to pave the way for easy access.

In the case of agents, businesses must take steps to provide tools and facilitate straightforward usage for them to deliver a better experience to customers. This includes managing skilling systems to improve productivity.

Optimizing the CCaaS environment is a necessity so that agents, administrators, and decision-makers can leverage real-time data and insights to pivot their CX delivery to address the changing needs of the customers and the industry.

Address the challenges that come with interaction traffic influxes during the holiday season with optimized contact centers

It’s almost the holiday season, and businesses across the board are now in a tech freeze. Deploying new technologies at this time is not advised. Instead, businesses must focus on optimizing their contact center operations.

One of the most effective and efficient methods of optimizing CCaaS environments is through automated CCaaS configuration and management, allowing CCaaS platforms to improve productivity, enable automation, and maintain greater visibility into their operations.

This is also key to providing businesses access to real-time data and analytics so that the traffic influx during the upcoming holiday can be managed effectively.