How to provide great holiday support for the digital shopper

As today’s holiday shoppers are doing most of their browsing and purchasing online, your shoppers are becoming more savvy yet picky. How will your customer support team meet the unique expectations of the digital shopper this holiday season?

This infographic will show you that the shopper of the hour is completely digital: 46% of holiday shoppers will browse and buy gifts online.

Mobile shopping is also on the rise with 21.4% of smartphone owners will use their device to purchase holiday merchandize, and 28.4% will use their smartphone to look up retailer information such as store hours, contact information and directions.

In order to get the perfect gift this year, shoppers say they will shop at discount stores (55.9%), department stores (55.6%) and online (52.9%).

Free shipping is a deciding factor for the digital shopper:

Nearly 46.7% said free shipping or shipping promotions are important factors in their decision on where to shop.
93.1% of online shoppers say they will use a free shipping offer when shopping for holiday merchandise.
46.5% of online shoppers say they will take advantage of the pickup in store or ship-to-store options.

Millennial online shoppers are most likely to take advantage of same-day delivery options (16.7% compared 7.8% of the rest of the population).

This holiday season, consumers are choosing a variety of channels to contact customer support:

68% prefer to first contact customer support via phone.
58% would then visit a retail or customer service location in person.
49% would email the company’s customer service address.
41% would use an online chat tool on the company’s website.

Also, 64% of holiday shoppers say they would use more than one channel to contact customer service if they had an issue with their gift; and 62% of millennials prefer to call customer service on the phone to address their holiday issues over other channels.

According to Taste Analytics CEO, Derek Wang, “Turning extra attention to social media channels over the holidays is surprisingly not going to be effective for most brands looking to provide additional support during the biggest retail season of the year as many are looking for direct human interaction to address their issues.”

Brands should obviously stay on top of their holiday shoppers’ demands. What is the value of delivering great customer service to digital shoppers? The ROI is high with 38% of holiday customers would feel more positive about a brand if they had customer service available during the holidays. Also, 69% are likely to be repeat customers and purchase from the brand themselves if a brand was able to fix their problem with a gift they received over the holidays.

What is the price of failing to meet their expectations? Quite high: 61% are likely to not be repeat customers if customer service was unable to correct the issue. Also, 74% noted they would unlikely be repeat customers if they were ignored or if their queries went unanswered.

The good news is that there’s a lot you can do to provide great customer service during the holidays. Here are six tips:

Prepare Ahead – Make sure you’re ready to attend to the flood of holiday customers by ramping up your number of customer service representatives and build out clear goals.

Multichannel Support – Make your customer support available across channels since customers are in a rush during the holiday season and will want to contact you via the most convenient channel possible.

Effortless – The impatient and picky digital shopper wants a seamless experience so make life easier for them by keeping your support contact information accessible on your site and ramp up your support staff.

Customize and Personalize – Your customer support tools should integrate with your CRM and e-commerce software to easily pull up customer purchase history and solve issues quickly to give a personalized experience.

Happy Home Agents – The holiday season is generally meant for time with friends and family so give your support agents the opportunity to work from home using cloud-based helpdesk and call center software.

Be Merry! – Put your frustrated customers at ease with a little holiday cheer. Spice up your IVR greetings and queue music in the holiday spirit and keep this messaging across support channels consistent.

All of our data in this infographic was pulled from the National Retail Federation (NRF) and Taste Analytics.