How to WOW Your Clients During the Holiday Season with High Level Service

Is there anything worse than having a bad customer service experience during the holidays?

The holidays are packed with stressful situations. You need to get everything at work finished before the holidays start. You need to buy presents. You need to decorate. And you need to go to all of those wonderful social occasions you’re invited to!

Earlier this week, I got a quick reminder of how important good customer service is over the holidays. I had ordered a very special holiday gift for my husband that was supposed to arrive on Monday. Wednesday morning, two days later, I awoke to an email notification from UPS. It said they had delivered a package from Sur La Table at 9:30 pm the night before. I excitedly rushed to the front porch, but saw no package. I ran around to the garage, still no package. I even looked on all of my neighbors’ porches and garages, guess what? No package! As soon as it opened at 9 am, I called Sur La Table’s customer service line. I was greeted by a super friendly gentleman named Bill who, after doing some research, said that he would put a trace through UPS and personally check its status every day (including the weekend) until I had my special holiday gift in hand. Hooray! I left the call feeling like Bill was going to take care of the issue for me, with no more work necessary at my end.

The last thing that I would have wanted in that situation was terrible customer service that left me frustrated and angry. Or even worse, if I was simply transferred to a million departments or putting me on hold forever. Neither was an issue when I called Sur La Table. I waited less than a minute for someone to answer and got Bill, who addressed all of my problems. Win!

Remember this story over the holidays. We all understand that the holidays are a busy time. Customer service can suffer at small businesses over the winter holidays, as there is just so much to do. Thankfully, a virtual assistant can help pick up the slack of client care so your customers can receive the same fantastic service they get every other month of the year. And you can give them a Sur La Table experience at your business too!

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Client Care
Excellent client care is something that should be practiced all year round, but it can be especially tricky during the holidays. Before celebrations, stress levels can be sky high and customers might not be as understanding or level-headed as they are the rest of the year. Providing responsive email replies, phone availability, and effective voicemail management can take some of the pressure off of them during this high-stress time of year. And letting a virtual assistant take care of these things can help take the pressure off you too!

Technical Support
When technology fails, stress and frustration levels can go through the roof. During the holidays, you need everything to just… work. And when they don’t, you need someone to fix them as soon as possible. It’s almost impossible to service your customers when your website goes down or your online store stops working. When you hire a virtual assistant to take care of these facets of your business, you don’t have to worry about it. If anything goes down, your VA will be right on it, getting your website or ecommerce store working again so fast that your customers won’t even realize that something went wrong!

[Tweet “Your clients need a smooth customer service experience. A virtual assistant can help!”]

Email Marketing
The holiday season is the perfect time to reach out to your clients and customers with a variety of offers and specials. People tend to be in a spending mood and wallets are more easily opened. Being provided with your excellent services at a bargain holiday price can be a welcome present when they open their email. Of course, you need to write and design the perfect email campaign or marketing blast to appeal to them. That’s where a virtual assistant comes in. We can design a multi-step holiday email campaign, with enticing holiday-appropriate copy and custom designed graphics, that will be automatically sent out at times of peak customer engagement using a fantastic service like MadMimi.

Don’t forget, your customers probably aren’t the only ones who are stressed about the holiday season. As a small business owner, you are probably under a lot of holiday pressure yourself. A Virtual Assistant can help reduce your stress level over the winter holidays by taking on a number of time-consuming tasks. To learn more about how you can use a virtual team, I invite you to check out my free How to Use a Virtual Team to Grow Your Business and Get Your Life Back: Workbook!

If you’d like to talk about how I can help you manage the holiday rush and give your customers the holiday service they deserve, please contact me today!