How to Keep Your Business Running During the Holidays

Do you know that you can enjoy the holiday season and take a vacation while keeping your business alive?

In the light of festivities, business owners are usually in a tug-of-war on who to enjoy the holidays while making sure that their business operations are on tip-top shape, especially it can be the most wonderful yet a busy and demanding time of the year. Of course, you wanted to keep everything running smoothly during a holiday rush and provide the holiday magic for your customers and your employees despite some changes from the current pandemic.

Major challenges that you need to overcome are; high customer service demand and vacation leave requests from your employees which leads to lack of manpower. But don’t let this overwhelm you. With the right team and the best plan, you can take the holidays by storm. Here’s are ways to keep your business running smoothly:

Plan Ahead

A good plan today is better than a great plan tomorrow. Simply put, if you know that there will be a surge of customer demands while a challenge in manpower, best to plan how to distribute and delegate tasks accordingly so no work is left undone. It allows you to create contingency plans and steps on how to manage the workload well. You get to know if your current team can handle keeping the business running smoothly or if you need back up support from freelancers or outsourcing some parts of your business. It will also help you know how much resources you can allocate if you need to outsource to keep up with the demand and address lack of manpower.

This will also help you transition back to work on your return and keep you from having to face a pile of work after the holidays.

Set Manageable Goals

Part of planning is setting manageable goals especially something that works with the new normal. Plan wisely by making sure it is Specific, Manageable, Attainable, Realistic and Timebounded (SMART). Because holidays are not a good time for disorganization, therefore aligning your strategic priorities and measuring what matters most for your business according to your resources will give you your desired results. Prioritizing and setting specific goals will help you achieve those key results easily.

Hire Extra Help

While your team is amazing, the holiday demand may require you to get extra help. This may be the best time to outsource some parts of your operations to make sure that you get to enjoy the holidays and yet ensure that your business is running smoothly by helping cover extra hours and longer shifts giving you an all hands on deck situation. With the right outsourcing, you are assured with:

Increased Efficiency

When there is an increase of load of tasks to be done and in-house staff might not be able to handle the strain. Hiring additional staff may not be the most practical since the demand is only short-term. With outsourcing, you can hire a great, high-performing team dedicated to help your business for a faster turnaround of your operations.

Scalability

During this season, high demand from inquiries, order volumes, and customer expectations rise dramatically. But the advantage of having the right outsourcing partner is scaling by making sure there are increased operational efficiencies without the added costs or even project a 70% cost savings. With their A+ recruitment process and access to world-class talent, they will take care of the seasonal hires so you can have the workforce you need to handle the high demand.

High Customer Satisfaction

If customer’s demands are addressed effectively specially during holidays, this entails satisfied, happy and jolly customers and clients. They will feel that despite the holiday rush, your business can handle the operations and that they are still well taken care of. Having happy customers gives business owners peace of mind.

The success of a business depends on wise decisions and outsourcing is one of the wisest decisions you can make to help your business make it through such a demanding time. When looking for a partner, make sure that they have a:

Net Promoter Score of >60

Net promoter score helps businesses gauge the quality of the customer service offered by outsourcing companies. Organizations can use NPS to assess which customer service BPO is best to partner with because this score shows loyalty trends and growth revenue outputs. In a way, NPS represents the primary way customers survey their experience because it means that their clients are happy, and this results in customer loyalty and retention, making a high NPS a critical trait a customer service BPO company should have. When used correctly, NPS (of at least 60%) can tell you how well the BPO is performing, how often they resolve issues, and if their clients are satisfied with their experience.

When you’re expanding your business, team up with a solutions partner that makes your process, their process. The right outsourcing partner ensure:

Operational excellence
Having a great, high-performing team
High customer satisfaction rate
Operational cost savings of up to 70%
Information and data security
71 Promoter Score: Sense of security and peace of mind

Infinit-O is the trusted customer-centric and sustainable leader in Business Process Optimization to Small and Medium businesses in the Financial Services, Healthcare and Technology sectors by delivering continuous improvement through technology, data and people.