Extra Hands for Six Weeks

The gap is knowledge, not competence

Seasonal help is usually capable and always uninformed, because everything your business knows lives in the heads of the people who have been there.

A temporary person cannot absorb that in a week and will be asked the same questions your regular staff are asked.

The difference is that they will answer confidently and occasionally wrongly, because inventing something is more natural than admitting ignorance to a customer.

So the preparation is not training; it is writing down what somebody needs on day one.

The two-page brief

• What the business does, in three lines.
• The ten questions and the answers.
• Three things to escalate, never answer.
• Who to ask, and how.
• The cutoff dates.
• What we never say.

Two pages is deliberate. A twenty-page manual is not read, and a two-page sheet beside the telephone is consulted, which is the difference between a document existing and a document working.

Write the ten questions from your own inbox

Which takes half an hour and is the whole of the useful content.

Read the last fifty enquiries and count what was actually asked.

It will be the same ten things, in roughly the same proportions, and eight of them will be answerable in a sentence.

Write the sentence you would use, in your own words, so the answer sounds like the business rather than like a script.

That document is also useful long after the season, since it is the beginning of the answers page your site should have.

Most businesses discover they have never written any of this down.

Name what must be escalated

Which is the part that prevents the expensive mistakes.

Anything about a delivery date that has already slipped.

Anything about a refund, a discount, or a price exception.

Any complaint that has become heated.

Say plainly that the right answer to these is that they will find out and come back, which is a good answer and not an admission of anything.

A temporary person given permission not to answer is far safer than one who feels they must.

Say it explicitly, since the instinct is otherwise to help.

A worked example

A shop took on two people for six weeks and briefed them verbally on the first morning.

By the second week both had told customers different things about the return window, and one had promised a delivery date that did not exist.

The following year the owner spent an hour writing two pages: what the business sells, ten questions with answers, three escalations, and the cutoff dates.

Both new people had it printed beside them.

There were no incorrect promises that season, and the document has been reused three times since with small edits.

The hour was the single highest-return preparation they did.

Decide what access they get

Which is the question that outlives the six weeks.

A temporary person may need the shop admin, the shared inbox, and the till, and does not need the bank, the payment processor, or the domain registrar.

Give them their own login rather than sharing yours, which sounds fussy and takes two minutes.

Then diary the removal of that access for a week after they finish, since the access that never gets revoked is always a temporary account from two Decembers ago.

That single diary entry closes the most common gap in a small business.

Tell them how you sound

Which is easy to overlook and immediately visible to customers.

Show them three real replies you have sent, which conveys tone faster than any description.

Say what you never say: no promises about dates, no comment on a competitor, no discussion of another customer's order.

And say what you always do: use the customer's name, say what happens next, and give a timeframe.

Three examples and two rules is enough for anybody capable.

Check in on day two, not day ten

Which is when a misunderstanding is still small.

Read a few of their replies at the end of the first day and correct anything immediately rather than letting a pattern establish.

Correcting on day two is coaching and correcting on day ten is criticism of a fortnight's work.

Ask them what they were asked that the brief did not cover, and add it, which improves the document every year.

That question also tells you what your website is failing to answer.

Tell customers who they are talking to

Which costs nothing and changes how a reply is received.

A message signed with a first name reads as a person, and one signed with the business name reads as a system, particularly when the answer is not what somebody wanted.

Add the new people to whatever the site says about who works there, even for six weeks, since a customer who checks and finds the name is reassured.

It also matters to the temporary person, who works better when they are named rather than anonymous.

Where somebody is genuinely new, saying so is fine: a reply beginning with a name and an offer to check with a colleague is entirely acceptable to customers.

The counter-case

Some help needs none of this.

Somebody packing orders in a back room without customer contact needs a different and much shorter briefing.

Returning seasonal staff also arrive knowing most of it, which is a strong argument for asking the same people back each year.

And an over-scripted person sounds considerably worse to a customer than an under-informed one who is straightforwardly honest.

Aim for informed rather than rehearsed, which is what the two pages are for.

A brief tells somebody what is true and a script tells them what to say.

Write two pages before they arrive, take the ten questions from your own inbox, name what must be escalated, and diary the access removal.

What to do

1. Read the last fifty enquiries.
2. Write the ten answers.
3. Name three escalations.
4. Show three real replies.
5. Give their own login.
6. Diary the removal.
7. Read their replies on day one.

Step three prevents the costly errors, since a temporary person told plainly that they may say they will check and come back will do that instead of inventing an answer.

The telephone side is covered in staff who do not normally answer the phone.

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.