How Not To Lose Customers During The Festive Season

Festivities have already begun with Diwali, Christmas and the New Year just around the corner.

The online spending wave is on and losing customers during this time, could cost you more than any other time of the year.

So, we’ve put together a checklist of things you can cross off, to make sure you are well prepared to catch every festive season shopper:

1) Equip Your Website For Increased Traffic

Scale your website to be able to handle each purchase request, check out process, payment gateway and delivery option. Apply load balancing technology to take care of your overloaded customers. Plus, you may benchmark your website to know exactly how many buyers you are able to accommodate to able to scale accordingly if needed.

Though increased traffic is a good problem to have, conversions can only occur if you are well equipped. You may choose to opt for a better web hosting solution.

2) Be Available For All Customer Queries

They say a modern consumer takes only 3 seconds to bounce and open another tab to go another competitor website. So, if a consumer has a query that will lead him or her to a purchase decision, you need to be there with the response before the customer gives up and leaves! And the worse thing is to be unresponsive during these times.

An AI plus Human chat platform is the best way to overcome this issue.

You May Also Be Interested In: 6 Live Chat Tools To Support Your Customers In 2020

However, other customers may choose to place a call or send a message via a social media messaging platform. In such a case, an omni-channel customer support system serves better. It catches customer queries from wherever they appear and enables customer support agents to connect conversations via various modes. eg: If a customer begins a conversation via chat, but then chooses to call, she shouldn’t have to explain the already expressed problem via chat to the agent she speaks to. This cuts down time and reduces customer stress.

3) Train The Customer Support Team

There are two reasons to ensure that your customer support team is well trained and aware of every feature, benefit and application of your product or service. This allows the team to handle a larger number of calls and provide resolutions faster. It also eases the customer’s mind and caters to their urgent, festive purchase needs!

This is also a time where there could be delivery delays, product exchanges due to impulsive buying or damage and defects. The customer support team should be experienced enough to keep calm and offer the ideal solutions to customers.

4) Make Customers Feel Extra Special

It is after all, a time of giving and celebration. Make your customers feel extra special by of course, offering discounts and deals. But another way is by extending personalised offers via your customer support mechanism.

Since customer support platforms offer valuable information on customers, you can use this to tailor gifts and offerings this festive season. Personalised packaging, a small gift to your valued customers’ friends list, a Diwali greeting video… anything to make a customer feel good about themselves.

5) Payment Options and Smooth Payment Gateways

One of the main choking points or reason to abandon can happen at the payment gateway points. You may not have complete control on bank websites or payment app traffic but you can offer a choice of options and the facility to move from one to another swiftly. Smooth payment gateways and a choice of payment options is in fact, a leading way to make your customers opt for you.

You May Also Like To Read: How A Reliable Payment Gateway Can Win More Customers

Due to Covid-19, there is a huge increase in online festive shopping this year. For E-commerce sites and Online marketplaces, this is a wonderful opportunity. But to be able to make most of this opportunity, one has to be prepared.