Can’t believe 2021 is already coming to an end? Neither can we.
With online sales expected to grow 11-15% this holiday season, we know the weeks ahead will likely be a critical time for your business — and we also understand the impact of the holiday surge on your customer support team. The holidays can be demanding and frantic for not just consumers, but also for businesses as they seek to balance demand and capacity in order to keep customers satisfied.
Research shows that 90% of consumers would not shop with a retailer again if they provided bad customer service, and we believe this to be especially true throughout the make-or-break peak season. The good news? With Kustomer as the foundation of your CX operations, you can feel peace of mind knowing that we’re prepared to handle increased traffic by safeguarding our platform with extra stability.
Read on to learn the steps we’re taking to ensure your business can rely on Kustomer to tackle the busy season with ease.
Step 1: Prepare Our Platform for Increased Traffic
Prior to the holiday season each year, our engineering team conducts a readiness review of all Kustomer services. The team validates that our services are prepared to automatically scale significantly beyond their normal operating levels in order to prevent any disruption during holiday traffic spikes. In addition to this, we consistently review our monitoring to make sure that it is properly tuned. This helps us detect any potential problems as early as they arise, allowing our team to intervene if necessary.
Step 2: Prepare Our Team To Respond
As part of holiday readiness preparation, we conduct a review of our incident management process with all engineers and support team members who support our customers during the holiday season. This helps us catch any tooling or knowledge gaps that might impede fast and effective resolution during an actual incident. We also use this as a time to align the whole team on the importance of the holiday season to our customers.
We recently added a “#kustomer-support” channel within our Kustomer Slack Community to provide our clients with additional ways to communicate with us in the event of an incident.
We regularly test our business continuity plans to ensure we have maximum coverage throughout the holidays. Our team will continue to promise 24/5 support throughout the season, plus critical coverage outside of business hours on Christmas and New Year’s Day.
Step 3: Reduce Risk of Disruptions
In addition to preparing for any problems, we work to reduce risk around our product by minimizing changes to our infrastructure and scheduling code freezes. During code freezes, we pause feature releases and updates to the platform — outside of any critical changes needed to ensure our goal of stability and high availability during this period of increased traffic. This year we will be pausing production releases during the following periods
- November 19th – November 29th
- December 17th – January 3rd
Building and maintaining trust with our clients has always been our top priority. While we know the holidays can result in tension for your team, we share in your goal of providing top-notch service to customers, and we’re here to support you every step of the way.
