Getting frustrated at work happens to everyone, and everyone should prepare their own survival tactics for feeling overwhelmed or frustrated.
When your work is customer support, and your job is to wear a happy face while dealing with angry customers, well it can be challenging to say the least. Heck, sometimes I get overwhelmed and frustrated when I get two chats at once and they're not both asking, "Where is your pricing page?" DO I LOOK LIKE I HAVE ALL THE ANSWERS PEOPLE?
I digress...
February might seem a bit late to reflect on the holiday shopping season, but many SMBs say their holiday season actually ends in January.
Now that we're actually clear of the holiday rush, I checked in again with a few Olark customers who signed up for our Cyber Monday Survival Kits this year. I wanted to know - "What did you learn this holiday shopping season?"
Nick Oliverio is one of only a few Olarkers who straddles the line between support and sales. He's also held sales positions with other companies before becoming the Chief Support Ninja at Olark.
Nick has a unique perspective on what it takes to be successful at both support and sales. While the two worlds are seemingly unrelated, as Nick explains in this interview, support has made him a better salesperson, and sales has changed his approach to customer support.
"I'll be honest - my first thought was, 'What has Marketing done?'"
Just before Thanksgiving, we sent an email to our customers to notify them of our reduced hours on chat support.
Unfortunately, as it was our first time out with a new piece of software, we made a few mistakes, which resulted in...about a month's worth of email volume in under an hour.
The following is an excerpt from The Cyber Monday Survival Manual.
With more customers comes more typing. And the time you spend typing your holiday hours for the 20th time, could be time spent helping another customer buy something new.
Canned responses help solve that problem.
"When I feel overloaded, I get tunnel vision. It becomes harder and harder to jump between tasks quickly and, more importantly, continue to provide quality service."
In the run-up to the holiday shopping season, we're offering some insight on what things are like when live chat gets really, really busy.
As you prepare for Cyber Monday, we want to provide you with as much information as possible to get you ready. So we thought - what could be better than hearing from those who have been on the frontlines during the busiest online shopping day of the year?
The following is an excerpt from The Cyber Monday Survival Manual.
When Cyber Monday has come and gone, you're going to want to know how well your team did.
One way to tell is to manually count the number of times someone rings the "official" Cyber Monday Sales Cowbell. (If you got our Survival Kits you know what I mean).
Another more accurate and efficient way would be to have Google Analytics keep track of the numbers for you.
The following is an excerpt from The Cyber Monday Survival Manual.
It's that time of year again - the holiday shopping season is here. That means Cyber Monday is right around the corner.
True, the timing is a little crazy - we're less than two months out from the start of the holiday shopping season.
[FURTHER READING: 4 predictions for the 2015 holiday shopping season, via Practical eCommerce]
Yet at the end of last year we did an informal poll of retailers (Retail Lessons for 2015) and when asked what they'd do differently for the holiday rush, many retailers said they would have added more operators on live chat:
