Every business knows the holiday shopping season in their bones, the way migrating birds know when it’s time to head for a warmer climate. This is the time when companies look to maximize their profits for the year… or simply turn profitable for the first time.
While many companies’ annual bottom line may not be dependent on the success of this season, the strength of their customer relations moving forward – especially with partners in the retail sector – may ride on how well they perform during the holiday crunch.
For all these reasons, businesses have gotten good at ramping up their operations in advance of the holidays. Frequently their mindset is looking for ways to survive the pace. But this can also be an opportunity to outperform their company’s own expectations and actually add long-term value to their business.
Using Last Year to Improve on This Year
As hybrid retailing has grown in popularity – combining online and brick-and-mortar purchasing and fulfillment – a networked ecosystem of services and infrastructure has grown around it. This includes logistics, warehouses, fulfillment, and customer support and service providers for the retailers as well as accounting services and manufacturers.
There is nothing particularly different about this ecosystem during the holiday shopping season. But the demand on these systems during this period can be orders of magnitude greater than the rest of the year. It is a stress test that often motivates a re-examination of systems and partners when the season is over. The season that follows is then the test of those decisions.
Most technology solutions tend to be scalable, assuming they’re the right solution for their intended purpose. If systems or providers don’t perform up to expectations, the problem is usually not having adequate staff trained and equipped to handle the surge.
For this reason, the holiday preparations of these various service providers tend to consist of increasing staff, training them up, and connecting them to the necessary platforms. The last piece of that particular puzzle is assuring the supervisors are skilled in managing these larger – and frequently temporary – teams.
A Year-Long Holiday Operations Strategy
In the same way that a business’s technology infrastructure is (hopefully) designed to scale to meet spikes in demand, a company’s employee strategy should do the same. That doesn’t mean maintaining holiday staff levels year-round; that would make no financial sense. A scalable personnel strategy means having recruitment, onboarding and training, technical provisioning, and supervisory processes in place to handle surges whenever they happen.
Let’s go through those one at a time:
- A Recruiting Pipeline
Even though posting job openings for seasonal personnel in October might be somewhat proactive, you are still leaving your holiday operations at the mercy of the jobs market. Maintaining targeted sources of reliable candidates year-round allows you to fill open slots with greater confidence and, perhaps, more uniform quality. Such resources can include schools, training programs, and even social service organizations.
Depending on the size of your business, it might be possible to have a stable of fractional employees who can then grow their hours during peak season. That means they already know the business and systems and need only minimal ramping time when the crunch hits.
Solvo nearshore BPO takes this a step further. We actually have our own talent development programs in addition to the resources mentioned above. The economics of our operating region – as well as the scale of our business – enable this approach.
- An Onboarding Onramp
Again, depending on the size of your business, a formal onboarding and training process might seem like more than is needed nine months out of the year. But the bill can come due in those peak three months when your most skilled people are taken offline to try to train up your seasonal help. Even with the best of intentions and effort, such training will likely still not yield the type of customer experience you want to put forward.
Devote some of your slower time during the year to formalizing a training program that is as self-taught as possible. This can include a range of materials, from videos to dummy accounts, which replicate the key tasks. This may involve a certain amount of investment. But it will probably be less than the hidden cost of training “on the fly” as peak season approaches and opportunity costs are at their highest.
- Plug-and-Go Platforms
If you are saddled with legacy or home-grown software platforms, at some point you will need to upgrade. Just because they are serviceable nine months of the year still might not justify relying on them during the holiday rush. Factor their performance during peak season into the cost/benefit equation for when to make the change.
This functionality should go beyond how well they handle your routine operations. Consider their ease of use by seasonal workers, and their ability to easily integrate with vendors or partners you only deal with during the one season. Steep learning curves come with a cost of their own, and difficult integrations may simply not be possible when everyone is busy. This can lead to clumsy work-arounds that complicate customer service and produce avoidable errors.
- Coaching Collaboration
As much as you need to train seasonal employees to work with customers and suppliers during the holiday rush, you need to train your supervisory staff to manage them. Knowing how to perform tasks and teaching others to perform them are two different skills. Being able to keep temporary teams motivated and on-task in often high-pressure situations is yet another important part of the job.
Identify your best people to be the leads during the holiday season. Make sure they have the training and tools they need to get your seasonal help up to maximum productivity as quickly and smoothly as possible.
What To Do If There Isn’t Time
If you find yourself up against the calendar without the help you need, there is always the option to outsource. As with any service, you will find a range of providers of varying quality and pricing to go with it.
The right resource will depend on the services you need. The more comprehensive the services, the better the quality tends to be. This is because the provider has more control over the process and is likelier to have refined their operations. While this might not result in the lowest cost, it can represent the best value.
The same equation laid out at the beginning of this article – the difference between doing the minimum to get through the season versus providing an optimal customer experience year-round – applies to outsourcing. The longer view you take of your customer’s holiday season experience, the better it is likely to be.
Strengthen Your Holiday Operations with Solvo
If you decide to outsource some or most of your back office operations, you owe it to yourself and your customers to discover Solvo. Our nearshore BPO operations take the long view of relationships to maximize the long-term value of your business.
We maintain a sophisticated recruitment pipeline to ensure a pool of well-educated and highly motivated candidates. When they come onboard, they become an extension of your team and are dedicated to your business. They are trained on your systems, hew to your processes, and are immersed in your culture.
The Solvo tech team is adept at integrating with virtually any systems clients use, including data and cybersecurity. So your Solvo worksite is literally an extension of your own. And, while your people have managerial control of workflow and performance, Solvo provides onsite managers for the irreplaceable one-to-one contact that keeps spirits and productivity up.
And that is the best kind of holiday spirit there is.
For more information about how Solvo can give you the help you need when you need it, visit https://solvoglobal.com/contact-us/
