How to Keep Your Customer Success Teams Organized and Prepared Throughout the Holiday Season

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The holiday season is upon us, and while that might mean family gatherings and hot chocolate for some, for those of us who know customer success, that might mean high-intensity, team-building teams. understaffed. The last two months of the year tend to be hectic. As the holidays approach, clients rush to wrap up projects before they leave the office, organizations want to use the remaining budget for the year, and even those who don't take vacations rush to wrap up projects because they know so many more will be unavailable.

This can create a lot of pressure for your customer experience teams that these employees turn to during this season, not only because your teams will have to skillfully help customers under stress, but because your teams might also try prepare for their own vacation or work with a smaller workforce than usual if the vacation has already started. This means customers and employees can be unhappy.

But it's not too late to be proactive and ensure your customer success team has a great holiday season. Here are some best practices to help you succeed:

Related: 6 Ways to Keep Employees Engaged This Holiday Season

Start early: While talking about the September holidays may seem silly, at my company we start talking about them long before they arrive. It's part of our strategy to approach the season with eyes wide open at all levels of the organization. We learned this the hard way two years ago when we weren't sufficiently prepared, and our Customer Success team ended up with a large backlog and frustrated customers.

When we approach it early, it gives us time to reflect on the challenges of the previous year, think about solutions, and then create the systems necessary to implement them. Employees and managers have the opportunity to share what went well and what didn't so they can prepare on both a team and individual level.

Talking openly about anticipated staffing needs also gives team members the opportunity to share their vacation plans in advance. This then helps us more accurately anticipate the size of our workforce and plan accordingly.

Use data to plan: Two years ago, we didn't have solid data for this time period, making it difficult to plan for now and the next year. This led to poor staffing, which resulted in poor customer experience. Since then, we've put a lot of effort into creating data analytics and collecting and using data from previous years to understand peak and downtime, which helps us optimize the staff.

Related: Get ready now so your team can enjoy the holidays while staying productive

Within the organization: Once the holidays begin, no matter how well you have prepared plans and people, the rush can still be overwhelming. We strive to stay tuned to the feelings and morale of our employees to ensure we can step in if someone needs a boost or a break.

On top of that, we try to be proactive in not only compensating people who work special hours fairly, but also recognizing everyone's hard work. It is true that it is always a priority for us, but especially during the festive period, it goes a long way.

To ensure that the support team has the resources they need, we have on-call contacts in other key teams so that even when people are out of the office there is always someone to turn to, whether it's IT problems, commercial questions or developments...