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How SMBs can handle more business queries during holiday season

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Sharath Kumar
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BANGALORE, INDIA: How you tackle calls coming into your system between now and the end of the year will decide the volume of new and repeat business in 2014. Yes, it is right! The holiday season is incredibly important for business - both big and small - especially when it comes to creating new opportunities. Unfortunately, most businesses, especially those operating with a small IT budgets, are ill-equipped for handling year end sales rush leading to loss of business opportunities.

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Considering that a huge number of potential customers will be visiting your retail outlet - both physical as well as virtual - searching for the best deals, best buys, discounts, and so on, it is important that each and every interaction is handled in a manner that would create or increase your brand loyalty.

You will do well to remember that every interaction you have with a customer can lead to future sales opportunities. The holiday season shopper want quick and seamless interaction with sellers and anything less than perfect is sure to put them off holiday shopping for a long time. You don't want that. You would rather make the most of this feel good spirit prevailing during the holiday season and create more business opportunities. But how do you do that with outdated technology.

Not possible. Your mobile phone or landline can handle only a certain volume of calls and can provide only a certain level of service. When call volumes increase, which they will during peak holiday seasons, your potential customer will be running against a proverbial brick wall all day long. Fat chance you'll get a repeat customer. In fact you'll be lucky to get any customer at all. Many businesses put in awful lot of legwork leading up to the holiday season only to blow it away with poor customer experience.

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The solution is easy. Provide 24X7 service, responsive support and seamless connectivity. It is not even back breaking costly. Cloud telephony will allow you to deliver wow level of customer service time after time without imposing a heavy cost burden on your fledging business.

Cloud telephony services scale on demand. And since they scale in or scale out dynamically you will never have to worry about excess or deficit in capacity. The system simply acquire additional resources (server capacity) when calls go through the roof and scale back when there demand goes flat. Cost-wise this is far more efficient than building excess capacity as a fallback for demand spikes.

During the holiday season it is natural for people to be socially active on various forums like twitter and facebook. However, businesses shy away from going social because they worry about what people may say about their business on social forums. Well, the truth is, people will say things about your business, irrespective of the fact you like it or not, but having a social media account will give you an opportunity to respond to negative comments about your business. By providing a toll free number you can take customer engagement to the next level by responding quickly to negative feedbacks.

(The author is CEO and founder at Knowlarity Communications)