How to prepare your business for the upcoming holiday season.

Have you started preparing for the upcoming holiday season? As business picks up, you want to be prepared as much as possible. From handling customer service issues, to stock and inventory processes and systems, here’s how to help you get started on preparing for the upcoming busy months.

Staffing

Whether you’re riding “solo” as an entrepreneur or a fully staffed small business, consider “beefing up” on additional help. Hiring a Virtual Assistant, or adding seasonal employees to your team can help increase productivity, streamline tasks that may fall by the way-side, when your business becomes really busy. Here’s a tip: Hire a Social Media Consultant to take care of all of your Social Media needs from posting to content creation. That’s one less task to worry about on your to-do list.

Customer service

During the Holiday season your customer service will truly be tested with returns, shipping, inventory, and processing orders within a timely manner. Rather than just “wing it”, prepare for the busy season as early as possible. Create a customer service model for handling communication channels, a customer resolution process, escalation, issues and a return policy. You may want to consider hiring more reps for high volume calls and to ensure that all of your communications channels are covered. Tip: create an email customer service system for answering, returning and responding to email inquiries, and to ensure that products are shipped within a timely manner. Have a member of your team strictly focus on email communications.

Inventory

Now may be the best time to create an operations process that includes monitoring and maintaining inventory stock, tracking orders and shipments. This includes double checking with manufacturers, vendors and wholesalers on a consistent basis to ensure purchased items will be delivered on time and stocked.

Marketing Strategy

Have you started working on a marketing strategy as a way to boost sales, increase profits and drive traffic to your website? Eventually business will start to pick up considerably. The best way to prepare for this is to plan ahead. Create your promotional offerings, campaigns, photos, include the social media platforms you’ll be using for your marketing campaigns. Do you plan on using “sales” and “promotional codes”? If so, you may want to plan the weeks, days and months you’ll run your campaigns for and which codes to use.

Major upcoming American Holidays

Halloween Monday October 31, October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month Friday November 11 Veterans Day, Thursday November 24 Thanksgiving, Shopping Holiday Friday November 25, Saturday December 24 Christmas Eve, Sunday December 25 Christmas Day, Saturday December 31 New Year’s Eve

Shavaughn Baker, CEO

The Corporate Concierge Group

Coaching, Consulting, Lifestyle Management, Event Services

Follow: Twitter @theconcorgroup Instagram thecorporateconciergegroup