As the holiday season approaches, a record number of workers are still quitting their jobs. Customer relationships are on the line, and businesses need to know how to maintain happy customers and customer loyalty.

News outlets first warned of a Great Resignation in the spring of 2021, in which millions of Americans, burnt out by the pandemic, stopped showing up for work. But months later, the crisis has hardly abated. In August, 4.3 million workers left their jobs—up from the 4 million who quit in April. Hiring challenges have radiated from the retail and service sectors to all industries, from marketing and PR agents to airline staff.

Customer service teams, too, are starting to feel the hiring crunch.

• Across the retail trade—the industry with the highest concentration of customer service agents—5.6% of workers quit their jobs in August.
• That’s up from 4.1% during the same month last year.
• When customer service workers are hired, some never show up to work, and others leave after the first day. Some even go all the way through training and never show up when the actual hard work starts!

In customer service, the crisis does not seem likely to fade soon. Onboarding takes employers 34 days on average to hire new customer service reps—a delay that means brands can’t hit their support department staffing metrics without advanced planning.

The holiday shopping season is only magnifying these shortages. In regular holiday seasons, retailers need to increase their frontline employees to meet customer expectations and demand. Target aims to bring on 100,000 seasonal workers in the coming months to avoid customer issues and deliver top-notch team performance. But this time around, the long hiring timelines and decline in customer support team members make those targets especially difficult to reach.

Companies across e-commerce and retail have stepped up their high-quality perks and pay to recruit and retain workers. Amazon is actively hiring warehouse and delivery workers and has bumped its pay up to $18 per hour in many warehouse and transportation jobs. On top of offering to cover the costs of college tuition and textbooks for workers with an eligible skill set. Others, like Chipotle and Papa John’s, are frontloading their workers with large signing bonuses.

To bring on more workers in time for the holidays, customer success executives could consider these tactics to ensure great customer service:

• Increase pay. Many of Chatdesk’s customers see CX as a revenue driver for converting pre-sale customer questions into orders and helping to drive repeat purchases and customer retention.
• Deal with burnout. Another reason that customer service workers are quitting is burnout. Since the start of the pandemic, customer feedback to inbound support lines, social media, and email and chat messages have skyrocketed. Real-time chatbots have moderately helped, but customer service workers have received more requests than ever under increasingly tight timelines. Even before the pandemic, 74% of contact call center agents reported that they were at risk of burnout, and those rates have likely only climbed since. Providing good customer service has become hard to reach. Companies could consider offering time off and other perks to combat burnout.
• Implement a more comprehensive knowledge base. A good knowledge base (ex. FAQs, on-demand webinars, troubleshooting templates) can provide self service to your customer support program while improving the overall customer experience. Providing self service customer information can eliminate customer interaction for your help desk specialist and solve customer needs.
• Use a more flexible solution. For brands struggling to hire enough support workers especially, small businesses, to get them through the holidays, Chatdesk Teams offers a way to drive revenue and exceed your customer satisfaction goals. Chatdesk seamlessly fits into your workflow by easily integrating with your CRM/customer service software with one click. Chatdesk also handles all hiring, training, and scheduling for support agents for brands. Companies like Moo.com and Thinx already use it to scale their support efficiently and drive sales.

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Schedule a demo here to learn more about how Chatdesk Teams can help you provide excellent customer service and combat the holiday season!