What went wrong during the last holiday season (and how can we avoid it this year)? Top retailers across organizations of all sizes are asking this question right now. (They’re also prioritizing transformation projects to update their tech stacks, systems, and operations across three core areas, as they prepare for Black Friday and the holiday season in 2024: conversational commerce, bots, and AI/automations.)

This blog collects the most valuable insights from the best four pieces of Zendesk content that’s been published in the last few years about designing an excellent customer experience in retail for the holidays.

1. Blend online and brick-and-mortar customer experiences to tap into increased shopper spend. Industry leaders manage ticket volume spikes with AI to answer common questions on preferred channels. (With Zendesk, you can also tailor offers, provide discounts, and personalize recommendations for unique shoppers.) Others integrate chatbots into messaging apps to automate personalized experiences.
2. Maintain high customer satisfaction as things get busy, even as holiday seasonality causes ticket volume and agent workloads to spike, by comparing your company performance to industry benchmarks for CSAT scores in the holiday season.
3. Increase marketing communications during the holidays with a larger number of customer segments. Some groups care about discounts; others care about fit and return policies. In retail, marketing communications are beginning earlier and lasting longer than ever.
4. Plan to post-mortem as soon as the holidays end. Zappos assessed average handle time for customer service requests, alongside call review data, customer feedback, forecasts, employee attrition, marketing campaign performance, and historical data by day and interval. Other best practices that Zendesk endorses include hiring early, training teams a lot, and creating festive team cultures.

Envoy has been honored to partner with dozens of retail and e-commerce customers, like Amazon, BlueBottle, The Honest Company, and Stitch Fix. (Many have worked with us for years!) These market leaders are also improving support, spending only on development, and avoiding last year’s mistakes.

Only Envoy has a 5-star rating in Zendesk’s partner portal – across thousands of projects! We’re the real deal – all 50+ of us, and we’ve been a Zendesk preferred partner for almost a decade. And thanks in part to the fact that I was the founding salesperson at Zendesk, we know their incredible platform like you know the back of your 2024 holiday goals.

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