How Should Businesses Prepare for Christmas?

It's the most wonderful time of the year, and despite all of the feverish anticipation from any child under the age of 14, for businesses, this can mean a mad dash to the finish line. From Black Friday up to the post-Christmas sales, there is an increase in demand for products, so we need to provide support. What can businesses do to prepare themselves for the Christmas season?

Streamline Your Customer Support

Your customer support can be pulled in a number of different directions during the holiday season. If a customer contacts you with a question, they will expect a timely response, which is not easy with the heavy traffic and sales volumes associated with the holiday season. But this is where you can benefit by having a number of communication channels, including live chat.

Those that learn how to set up live chat on website platforms are going to reap the benefits because they are increasing their reach. Live chats have a number of distinctive benefits, namely the fact that you can do a lot more with less. Customer service agents can handle multiple tasks at the same time. This, in conjunction with streamlined customer support, can make sure you don't fall at the final hurdle.

Change Your Marketing Strategy

When preparing for the Christmas period, you cannot opt for the same tried and tested strategies that are effective throughout the year. Offering a service to customers means that you need to analyse your objectives for the upcoming season. You may benefit from showcasing limited products for the season and new features to ensure you are competitive and benefit, not just from an increase in traffic, but the last-minute orders from many customers.

Limited-time offers, discounts, and free shipping are all amazing features that can bring people to your website, but only if they are promoted effectively. Adjusting how you promote via social media, email, and even in your web design to incorporate more Christmas themes can all give the customer a little nudge to make purchases from you.

Stock Up on the High-Demand Products

If you are promoting items with limited offers for the Christmas season, you need to go beyond great offers to attract customers. When you offer great value on a very specific collection of products, these will always be the first to go, so if you don't want to be caught short, you have to stock up on those high-demand products.

When you make the effort to attract customers, only for them to find that you are out of stock, this is going to result in disappointment which they will associate with you and can make them think twice about returning to you. Additionally, when a customer doesn't find what they are looking for, you are instantly driving them to competitors. It's critical to have a backlog of products that have sold particularly well in previous years, which you can review from previous years and monitor through tools such as Google Trends.

Strengthen Your Website Security

In addition to preparing your products and your promotions, you must prepare the platform as well. Cyber attacks are at their zenith during the holiday season because of the high volume of traffic. Christmas is a time when scammers and criminals are out in full force. A cyber-attack is going to render your business incapacitated, which will hurt your sales and your reputation. If a customer is not able to access your site because of cyber attacks like DDoS attacks (distributed denial-of-service), you must ensure that your website security stays sturdy.

Before the holiday season kicks in, you need to do some of the following:

• Consult your web hosting provider to see if they can provide extra layers of security.
• Activate 2FA (two-factor authentication) for everything possible.
• Do not store unnecessary customer information, and only keep what you need for deliveries and marketing purposes.
• Upgrade your web hosting.

Prepare Your Sales Staff for Customer Engagement

In order to deal with the stress of the holiday season, it's critical that your staff is ready for the onslaught. The retail world experiences a lot of stress because of the need for more stock quickly, but also the volume of customer complaints. Needless to say, tensions are high!

Ensuring your customer service staff are grounded and feel calm can help to develop that all-important relationship. If you are looking for how to set up live chat on website platforms, it's critical that your customer service agents have a number of simple and effective skills that can ensure that customers are happy and will continue to purchase from you for months, or years, after the fever of the Christmas season.