According to the Dallas Morning News holiday sales over the Thanksgiving weekend were up, including impulse buying and "self-gifting". Great news for retailers and your business. Cheers all around!

But increased sales often translate into increased customer support calls, especially once all those holiday gifts have been opened and found to be:

1. defective or broken
2. confusing to use/lacking documentation
3. needing more accessories (this is not a bad problem to have I guess, cross sell opportunities abound)

Are you prepared for the onslaught?

You need a way to keep your costs down yet keep customer satisfaction up. Fortunately, there are several options that can help you toward these goals.

First of all, a self service center portal can be available 24/7/365 and doesn't demand time and a half for holidays. To get the best value from it,

• you need to ensure that the knowledgebase accessed by customers is completely up to date, including any new products you released for the season as well as solutions for known problems
• the FAQs must also up to date 
• Any special messaging for individual customers or groups must be in place before-hand
• Any required downloads or online registrations must be prepared
• Forums must be available and easily accessible to new customers
• Everything in all these areas must be easily searchable

With more and more people using online resources to help them, you want to be certain your company is the one with all the answers for your products.

Of course, some issues won't be covered by self service and customer may need to sumbit a ticket, either online or by email. In either case, wouldn't it be great if your customer support software used the verbiage of the email or ticket submission to offer possible solutions already in the knowledge base? That could stop a few tickets as well. And if there is nothing helpful, those emails can be automatically turned into incident tickets and assigned to the appropriate party without intervention from the staff. Online ticket submission: same thing.

But sometimes customers just need to talk to someone or use a chat channel. Either the issue is too complex, they are not able to find answers in the knowledge base, or simply prefer to do business over the phone. With the above options, the number of calls should be decreased enough to allow your agents to comfortably help those who call in without being overwhelmed.

Your agents can also get a break by having a customer support solution that takes care of all their needs: a place to record customer information, incident information, to access a knowledgebase and FAQs, and a way to record the interaction with the customer....all without tabbing through numerous non-integrated applications.

Alerts can be created and scheduled to launch automatically. Reports, escalations, changes...all can be launched and brought to the attention of anyone who needs to know. Chat logs can be easily submitted as incident tickets.

You can do it. We have the technology. And it won't cost $6 million to put your customer support on "bionics".

What are some ways you keep up with the holiday rush? Share them with us in the comments.