Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Predicting Your Holiday Success

Halloween is the second most profitable holiday for online retailers next to Christmas, driving nearly $7 billion in sales. How your company performed during this time is a great preview of what's to come the rest of the year. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday fast approaching, now is the time to analyze your productivity and plan for a successful holiday season.


During this time, take a closer look at how your customer service staff is performing, taking into account the number of emails received, the time it took your staff to respond, and what topics were frequently addressed.

ReplyManager makes it easy to compile a summary of your customer service productivity during a certain time. The following are ways to do so.

Monitor Staff Productivity

Were you surprised by your Amazon response ratings? As you know, Amazon includes weekends and after-hours into their calculations, failing to recognize that you may not work during those times. To get a more accurate idea of how long it took your staff to answer emails when they were actually in the office, you can run administrative reports.

TIP: Run reports based on Average Response Times. You can search results for specific users or folders. Refer to our previous post, "Response Time and Resolve Time Reports" to see how these work.

Track Email Volume

Did you experience a high volume of product questions or return requests? Halloween may be a good indicator of how much and what type of traffic is to come in the next few months. You may find that your company is receiving more customer emails than your staff can handle, or that you have too many agents answering certain email subjects.

TIP: Run reports by Category Summary, Reference Summary, or Space Utilization by Folder. This will give you an idea of how many emails came in regarding each subject and how to prepare your staff in the future.

Manage Space Usage

ReplyManager's pricing structure is based on storage space. During the Halloween season, your company may have received double the number of emails it did earlier in the year. For this reason, it is important to track how much space was used to determine how much space will be needed for the upcoming months.

TIP: Run a report by General Statistics for a certain time frame. This will give you an overview of how many incoming and outgoing messages were sent and received in your account, along with how much space they occupied.

Document Frequent Replies

Did you find that your staff spend a lot of time typing or copying store policies into emails? Take a look at your Standard Replies. Update your list with store policies such as shipping and returns to make sure everything is in place once Black Friday comes around. Doing so will ensure your staff is able to answer customer questions quickly and accurately.





by Samantha Warner
Marketing Extraordinaire