Love it or hate it, we’re approaching that time of year when Christmas is on everybody’s minds.
Whatever your business does, whether you’re a service-based company expecting a quiet December or an ecommerce business anticipating a mad rush, there are certain actions you can take to make sure your Christmas period runs smoothly.
Read on for our 3 top tips that will apply to pretty much every business in the UK!
1. Show your Christmas opening hours online
Whether you sell legal services, houses or sweets, your customers need to know when they can expect a response from you over the Christmas period.
In order to get these hours displayed conveniently in search, the best thing to do is update your Google My Business profile.
Select all relevant businesses click the edit (pencil) icon and look for the prompt that says ‘Add special hours.’ When you click that prompt, you should see this window:
You can also select ‘add new data’ at the bottom of this window if you have limited opening hours during the rest of the Christmas week. Please remember that it can take up to 3 days for these changes to be applied, so make them as soon as possible to make sure your customers have good visibility of them.
As well as Google My Business, you should also display your Christmas opening hours on your website. Adding something to your homepage or the page where your hours are normally displayed is probably the easiest way to achieve this.
Having the right hours displayed ensures that customers know what to expect from your business over the Christmas period, which prevents any annoyance on their end. Clear communication is always best, especially at this time of year.
2. Let your social media followers know when you can respond
As more customer interaction moves to social media, listing standard office opening hours may not be enough. Depending on how you normally manage social media, some customers may expect interaction outside of normal times.
If this is the case, it’s important to manage expectations for when customers can expect responses in December. Facebook and Twitter both have pinned post functionality, which means you can ‘stick’ a particular status or tweet to the top of your profile page, ensuring its visibility to anyone who clicks on your profile until it’s taken down.
Thanks to Twitter’s newly expanded character limit, it should be easier to publish Christmas response information in a single tweet. For example, you could write something like:
“To give us some time to enjoy Christmas with our families, we’re sorry to say we won’t be able to respond to tweets on Christmas Day, Boxing Day or New Years’ Day. But don't worry, we'll get back to you at the soonest possible opportunity. Merry Christmas everyone!”
Another option would be to create a graphic to communicate Christmas opening hours information, which is less personal but more eye-catching in a social feed. However you choose to publish the information, make sure you’re as clear as possible, without coming off as cold. Wishing your customers a merry Christmas can go a long way!
3. Prepare your staff for more or less activity
If you’re an ecommerce business, you may be anticipating a very busy few weeks. If you’re a business to business service business, you might be expecting a very quiet period.
In both cases, it’s important to make your expectations clear to staff so that your services can be at their best in any situation. That said, more preparation is needed if you’re expecting a spike in sales. In this case, it can be helpful for both staff and customers to be aware of a cutoff for guaranteed pre-Christmas order fulfilment (this prevents unreasonable customer expectations come Christmas Eve).
It may also be considering if overtime is required in any departments of the company to make sure everything goes smoothly. If this is the case, it needs to be handled early and sensitively.
If you’re expecting low sales over this time it’s important to make that clear to stop employees getting discourage. It can also be helpful to encourage focus on other activities to make sure the time in December is still spent wisely.
If you’re planning on going so far as to close the office over the Christmas week, you also need to communicate to staff whether or not holiday during this period comes out of their contracted time or not so that everyone can prepare properly.
published under Management
