Customer Service Over the Holidays

Reduced is fine, unannounced is not

Customers do not expect a small business to answer at full speed between Christmas and the new year.

What produces complaints is silence: a message sent, nothing back, and no indication whether anybody will reply this week or next.

The person then assumes the worst, sends a second message, and by the time somebody responds there is a problem that did not exist.

So the work is deciding what you will actually do and then saying it, rather than trying to maintain normal service.

Decide the coverage first

• Which days anybody is checking.
• Which hours on those days.
• Who, by name, on each.
• What counts as urgent.
• Who to reach for urgent things.

The third is what makes it real. A rota saying somebody will check produces the situation where three people each assume one of the others is doing it, which is worse than nobody being assigned.

Publish the response time you will meet

Rather than the one you would like to.

Two working days over the holiday period is an honest figure for most small businesses and is entirely acceptable to customers who are told.

Same day is not achievable with one person checking twice, and promising it produces the failure.

State it in the places somebody sends a message from: the contact page, the form, and the automatic reply.

Then meet it, since the published figure becomes the standard you are judged against and a met promise of two days beats a missed promise of one.

Where you will not be checking at all on certain days, say those days explicitly rather than giving an average.

Separate urgent from everything else

Since most holiday messages are not urgent and a few genuinely are.

Define what urgent means for your business, concretely: a delivery that has not arrived before a date, a failure affecting something in use, a payment problem.

Give a route for those specifically, which might be a telephone number, a text, or an address checked more often.

Say plainly that everything else will be answered on a stated date, which most people accept without complaint.

That split means the person covering is watching a small number of genuinely urgent items rather than a whole inbox.

It also protects whoever is on duty from feeling obliged to answer everything at all hours.

A worked example

A business closed for ten days and left an automatic reply saying they were closed and would respond on their return.

They came back to forty-one messages, six of which had escalated into complaints because customers had waited without knowing anything.

Two had gone to reviews.

The following year they published specific dates, said messages would be answered within two working days, gave a mobile number for deliveries that had not arrived, and had one named person checking each morning for twenty minutes.

They returned to a similar number of messages, most already handled, and no complaints.

The coverage was about three hours in total across ten days.

Prepare the answers in advance

So that twenty minutes a day is enough.

Most holiday messages are the same handful of questions: where is my order, can I still get it before a date, can I return this, are you open.

Write those replies in November, with the dates filled in, and keep them somewhere the person on duty can copy from.

That turns a message that would take ten minutes to compose into one that takes one, which is what makes brief daily coverage viable.

Include the difficult ones as well, particularly the message saying something will not arrive in time.

A well-written version of that message, prepared calmly, is considerably better than one written at speed on a Sunday.

Brief whoever is covering

Since the person on duty may not be the person who normally answers.

Give them the prepared replies, the dates, and the answer to the ten common questions.

Say what they can decide themselves, which should be more than they would assume: a refund up to an amount, a resend, an apology.

Say what to escalate and to whom, with a number that will be answered.

Somebody empowered to resolve small things resolves them, and somebody who has to check everything creates a queue that defeats the arrangement.

Set the expectation before you need it

Because the message that prevents complaints is sent in advance.

Tell customers your holiday arrangements a fortnight before, in whatever channel you use, including the response times and the urgent route.

Put the same information on the site, the listing, and the automatic reply, with identical dates in all three.

Include it in order confirmations during December, since somebody ordering on the twentieth needs it more than a subscriber does.

And update the business listing hours, which is the one people check and the one most often forgotten.

Protect the person covering

Worth stating separately, since the arrangement fails when it depends on somebody sacrificing their holiday.

Twenty minutes at a stated time is a commitment somebody can keep, and being reachable all day is not, even when the volume is low.

Say plainly that they are not expected to answer outside the agreed window, since without that they will check constantly anyway.

Rotate it rather than defaulting to whoever is most conscientious, which is how one person ends up covering every year.

And where somebody does work a day, note it and give it back, because the goodwill this runs on is finite and worth more than the coverage.

The counter-case

Coverage has a cost and it lands on people who deserve the break.

A genuine full closure, announced clearly and well in advance, is entirely legitimate and better than a half-service that nobody is really doing.

Over-committing also creates a precedent, since the response time you offered this year is the one expected next year.

And for many businesses the volume genuinely does not justify anybody working.

Decide the arrangement honestly, name one person per day, publish what you will meet, and prepare the replies in advance.

Before December

1. Decide which days anybody checks.
2. Name one person per day.
3. Publish a response time you will meet.
4. Define urgent and give it a route.
5. Write the common replies now.
6. Say what the person on duty can decide.
7. Update the listing hours.

Step two is what prevents the common failure, since a rota that names nobody produces three people each assuming somebody else is covering.

The full closure version is covered in closing over the holidays without losing enquiries.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.