MBA1516 How to Manage Support Coverage During Holidays

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Hey oh. Welcome to the 100 RMB Business Strategies and ideas for your business every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zedholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn how to manage support coverage during holidays. Every time a public holiday rolls around, whether it's Christmas or Easter or your National Day holiday, you need to figure out what you're gonna do with customer support. Will you be able to support customers even though it's a national holiday? Do you do shift work? How do you manage this so that your customers get the best support but at the same time your team is allowed to take the time off they need to rest and recuperate? We've experimented with a whole bunch of different ways of managing support during holidays and recently during Easter. We tried something new and I wanna share with you what are the things that have worked and have not worked for us over the years. So let's get into it. Let' down to business. I truly believe that customer support in your business is one of the best things you can invest in. If your customers get supported, if they get the help they need, when they need it, At a high level of quality, they will not leave you. They'll rather stay with you than go to a competitor because of that support. It's a differentiator. It's a way for you to really stand out and build real loyalty. They say all you need is a thousand raving customers or raving fans to have a successful business. This is a way to attain those thousand customers, get them through the door, give them a great product to serve them properly. But what do you do when it's a holiday? What do you do when people are expected to be off? I'm talking about your employees. Now, if you run a global company like we do with people around the world, and we serve customers around the world, where today could be a holiday for some people and not for others, because either it's a holiday in that country or time zones, you know, it's a different day in another part of the world. How do you manage all that? And we've experimented with a lot of different things. So I want to share with you some things that have worked. So one of the first things that you really should do is always, always give your customers a heads up. Whatever you decide, whether it's limited hours, whether it's reduced hours, or, you know, you have no support coverage during a certain number of days. We always do that, especially during big holidays like Christmas and Easter. And we let our customers know, hey, from this day to this day, we will not have support or we'll have limited support. So keep that in mind. We also make sure we let them know when support will be back, the exact time and day, so people understand when they should get a response or when they can reach out again and hop on, chat and ask some questions. And normally that's what we did with big holidays like Christmas, where we say, you know, from this day to this year off. And same thing with New Year's, but this time around with Easter, we tried something different because there was a huge influx of new customers because of COVID And we wanted to make sure that we can support them and help them out even during holiday. So what we did is we asked our team members over at the support department, you know, customer support, and we asked them, hey, is anybody willing to work during Easter during these days that we are normally off? And we offered double time pay. So what they would normally get paid for that day, they'd get paid double. We also gave them the option, instead of double pay, is to take an alternate day off, like a free day for themselves. At another time, we were not sure how that would come off. You know, we have a team of seven people on support, but we put it out there, and we got three people saying, yeah, I'd love to work and earn extra money. And I believe two of the three actually asked for two days, not just one, to get overtime. And this allowed us to have full coverage during the holidays. Now, we made it very clear to our team this is totally optional. And if you don't take this option, if you don't take or put your hand up and say, hey, I want to work during the holidays, it's not going to be reflected negatively. We just want to try something new and see if this is possible. And people put their hand up, which was great for our customers right now after going through that experiment, you know, it's a great win for our customers. They got support during a holiday, you know, for some of our employees that decided to take that shift, you know, they got, you know, extra pay, which they really enjoyed. But it made us think, do we want to even make this an option in the future, or do we want to actually sort of force our team to take some time off and not feel overworked? And it was a real debate, like, do we really need to work during the holidays and offer the support? And we realized that as our team has grown over the years, the answer to that question has changed. You know, previously, when we were a smaller team and we had a smaller number of customers to serve, we were like, you know what? Let's just take the time off and let everybody have the time off. But now that our team is a little bit bigger and we're serving a lot more customers, even just having one or two people put their hand up again, optionally, it's not like the whole team is working. So it's offering this opportunity for people if they want to take it. Now, by making this decision and making it optional, we're opening ourselves up to the fact that, hey, there are going to be some people that don't put their hand up, and there'll be times where we'll have a holiday. We'll. We'll have no coverage. And if that's the case, then we're going to have to communicate that to the team. And of course, we do this well in advance and we ask for volunteers beforehand. And in that case where we shift to the decision that we are not offering support, there are other things you can do to make sure your customers are supported. Of course, we talked about communication, letting them know that support won't be available during these days and you let them know in advance. We let them know via email. We let them know by in app message. We also put it in the welcome message of our messenger app, a little intercom that we use on our site. But we also, during the days that we're off, we implement two things to make things easier for customers. We have automatic bot. It's called a resolution bot. And this is built into Intercom. You could pay for it, it's like an upsell. And you can program this bot to answer questions, common questions that your customers might ask. And basically it answers those questions based on how you answered questions in the past in your system. So say for example, I see that there are five common questions that all my customers ask. I go to to the bot, I say here are the questions and these are the different ways it could be asked. And then the bot will suggest some answers based on how I answered this question in the past from my former conversations or past conversations. And by having this available to my customers even when we're not available, the bot can serve them some answers that they're looking for. And you can make it 10 questions or most common 20 questions. This is what we did. We also offer an FAQ page. Hey, here's our FAQs. You might find your answers here. And we also offer our bank of tutorials so they can search our tutorial library to get answers to their questions. So they're not totally without support. They have like self serve support which is good. And of course we let them know that when we're back in service, when we're back in office, we will serve them immediately on this time and date. So make sure you come by the site then or send us an email now and we'll respond to you when we get back.

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One of the challenges of allowing time off for your employees during holidays is if you run a global team like we do, we have employees all over the world. Everybody has a different national day or fourth of July, right? Everybody has different local holidays, even different religious holidays. So you need to be mindful of that. And that's one of the things we learned really quickly when we started hiring people around the world, that there are some holidays that we may not be used to or not recognize, but we need to make sure that we respect that. And that's what's great about having a global team, is that you'll have coverage because some people will be on holiday and some people won't. And especially if you have that spread around the world across departments, that really helps because everybody kind of gets a chance to take some time off for their own personal holidays, their own personal local holidays, I should say. So keep that in mind when you're hiring people from different parts of the world. For a team member in The Philippines, the 4th of July is just another day. While an American will not know that Australians have a holiday called Anzac Day, which is a national holiday in Australia. So you gotta kinda make sure that you do a bit of homework, especially if you're hiring somebody outside of the country that you're based in. And of course, this applies to your customers. Some customers that you serve are going to expect service on certain days because that's not a holiday for them. So make it clear to your customers in advance as much as possible when you will be off. The default should be on and then when you're off, let them know. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA Show. Hit subscribe right now so you don't miss a beat. By hitting subscribe, you get the next episode as soon as it's published. Also by hitting subscribe, you get access to all our archive episodes. Over 1500 business lessons for you to sink your teeth. So go ahead and hit subscribe right now on whatever you use to listen to podcasts. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. If you build a good customer support team that serves your customers efficiently, it's going to be one of the best things you do for your business. It's one of the best things we've done for our businesses and we continue to try to invest in that department because we know it's time and money well spent. Companies and your competition can compete on price and features and all the other things, but they really can't compete on the way you treat your customers. That's how you can differentiate yourself. Great customer support. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of Foreign.

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