You’ve already spent months preparing for the holidays by advertising to your current and possibly new customers to try and sell your products. You’ve done everything you can to convince customers that you have the perfect gift for their friends or family members. And while there’s still a couple more days of shopping left, you’ve probably already sold the majority of what is going to be bought for the holiday season.

There will be another buying rush on Christmas Eve in stores, but what you really need to begin preparing for is the post-holiday rush. Most of week after Christmas will be filled with people returning and exchanging gifts, calls about problems with gifts, and calls with questions about how your product or service really works. Now is the time to get prepared for the post-holiday rush.

Training, training, training

The best thing you can do to prepare for the week after Christmas is to train your customer service agents. Make sure they know anything and everything about your products or services, so they are able to quickly and easily ask questions. Your customers don’t want to wait on hold for ten minutes while the rep finds a manager who knows what they are talking about when you could have just informed everyone of different specials or problems you have been having.

The right technology

Providing the right technology to your employees will make a huge difference in their ability to serve your customers. Make sure they have the ability to access any information they might need, and get them trained on how it all works, so they don’t waste any time on a phone call trying to get their computer to work or find the right thing.

Make sure you have your AI Chatbot texting services up to date with answers to common questions for your business, so people can get the fast and clear response they need if they don’t want to take the time to call in. And make sure your website is updated with as much information as possible and with as easy of a navigation as possible, so your customers can get the answers themselves if they don’t want to spend time on the phone.

Easy returns

Over a third of people will return at least one gift they received at Christmas this year. Your business needs to be prepared for the long lines or extra costs this will incur on the business. You will also want to make sure you do whatever you can to make this easier on your customers. It may seem ridiculous to make returns easy on a customer because you ultimately want them to keep the item, but you also want to give them a good experience, so they consider returning again.

One thing you can to help with this is to allow for returns without a receipt for in-store credit. This can help streamline the process for those without receipts but who want to return the gift anyway. Another option is to get a system in place to look up receipts based on the credit card for people who didn’t keep the receipt but have the same credit card they purchased it with. You will never go wrong making things a little easier for your customers.