How to Prepare for Call Center Call Spikes

Call spikes are a serious challenge a call center can face during peak seasons, after a successful marketing campaign, or when a new product is released. If the number of interactions with customers rises significantly and your team is not prepared, each member can feel the growing workload and pressure. Customers can struggle to reach you when the waiting time is prolonged.

At Simply Contact, we have long-term experience handling call center call spikes. The solution is to apply proactive strategies and always be prepared. In this article, we will discuss how to manage the spikes and give you a few recommendations to make it easier for your team.

Understanding call spikes

Call spikes occur when the number of customer calls suddenly increases. Recent marketing campaigns, new product releases, special promotions, and seasonal sales can be the reasons for call number growth. However, negative factors like service issues, natural disasters, unpredictable crises, or data breaches can also occur. The best you can do is to ensure that you will never be taken by surprise.

Which industries are most prone to a call spike?

A lot of industries can suffer from expected and unexpected call peaks, but according to our experience, it most often happens with the following ones:

Travel and hospitality

Traditional call spike reasons are holiday season peaks, weather issues, flight cancellations or delays, and big events (concerts or competitions).

Retail and e-commerce

Call spikes in these industries are mainly caused by seasonal holidays and huge resales like Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

Finance

The most common reason for call peaks in the financial segment is tax season, but call rises also happen during stock market changes and fraud and security alerts.

Healthcare

Pandemics, flu seasons, and mass accidents can cause huge spikes because of the rising number of health problems and those who need urgent help.

Insurance

Call spikes occur most often after accidents or natural disasters. You can also notice rising call numbers during policy renewal periods.

Call spike forecasting and planning

Forecasting and planning are essential for productive team preparation; data analysis can help you with both stages. AI-powered analysis enables accurate call volume forecasts, ensures smoother service operations, and helps to optimize staffing effectively.

Call center predictive analytics is a powerful technology that will help you know when exactly you should expect the growing volume of calls. The use of predictive analytics helps raise operational efficiency by up to 68% and boost agents’ productivity by 66%. For example, Genesys utilizes predictive analytics to forecast peak call periods, allowing companies to apply resources more efficiently. 

Historical data analysis allows you to identify trends from past call logs during seasonal and daily peaks. It will help to predict repeating patterns like holiday surges, and you will know when you can get bigger call loads. For example, you can use Insight7, Five9, and RingCentral to analyze historical data and use identified trends for accurate peak predictions. 

Real-time data monitoring solutions will help track live call metrics, including wait times, lengths, and abandoned calls. They will show how well your current team handles the workloads and whether you need to scale for better results. For example, tools like Splunk and Zendesk Explore can monitor live call trends and send notifications to managers.

Advanced AI-powered models use machine learning techniques to detect complex changes in call volume. With the help of self-learning algorithms, they gradually reduce the chance of forecasting errors.

Staffing solutions to handle call spikes

Companies try various approaches to call spike handling, but we consider seasonal hires, outsourcing, and automation to be three main directions of improvement. Let’s examine each option to understand their advantages.

Seasonal hires

Businesses often struggle to choose between hiring an in-house team and outsourcing, but if you already have your in-house team and feel that you want to extend it temporarily, you can try seasonal hires. Temporary employees manage the demand spikes without long-term contracts. As a result, you handle an excessive workload, reduce operational costs associated with full-time employees, and hire only when you need it. 

Seasonal hires are quite common for offline-type positions. For example, if you need extra staff during a surge in sales or your hotel requires more hotel guides or event planners. However, call centers also use such a solution when they need extra agents for holiday orders, global sales events, or tax seasons. Just keep in mind that new staff will require training and preparation before work starts, which requires additional expenses.

Outsourcing

Outsourcing is one of the most convenient ways to scale your in-house team. You hire a third-party company and get trained professionals to step into the work after a briefing and a few days of training. This option gives you access to the world market of experts from various industries. It is a cost-saving option with a high level of flexibility. Your outsourced partner will be able to adjust a team’s size according to current demands, taking this problem off your shoulders. For example, Simply Contact can add up to 50 more agents per month, extending the team to the required size.

The market offers a wide range of companies experienced in various business domains, and you can choose a provider according to your requirements. You can select a team that will fit specific locations, languages, time zones, etc.  

Automation is a must-have during a call spike

Whether you want to hire additional team members for your office, use third-party services, or deal with the workload on your own, automation is your irreplaceable helper. In our experience, AI-powered solutions significantly reduce wait times, improve efficiency, and enhance customer satisfaction without overloading your human staff. 

Chatbots and virtual assistance can reduce the number of calls by answering frequently asked questions, helping with basic troubleshooting, and providing order status. You can apply IVR for the self-service option or offer users an automated callback once the agent is available. AI-powered solutions with speech analysis and sentiment detection can indicate angry or frustrated signs in customers’ voices to prioritize such calls for faster response. 

Whatever you choose, just keep in mind that new technology always requires staff training to ensure that your team gets the best from the solution and experiences its entire power. To avoid employee burnout during call spike periods, assembling a bigger team with a flexible schedule is an option. For instance, if your company gets more calls in the morning, lunch hours, and late afternoon, you can adjust shifts to cover specifically these periods instead of the traditional 9-to-5 setup.

Technology to support call spikes handling

If you want to prepare for call spikes efficiently, we recommend paying special attention to the technology you choose for your call center teams. We’ve already mentioned some before, so now let’s review in detail the three types of tools we consider the most helpful during the peak periods.

IVR

IVR, or interactive voice response system, is one of the most effective self-service options. It can guide your customers through menus and self-help instructions so users can check account balances, track orders, or get required information without a human agent. An interactive voice menu will help direct users to the right department for more complex issues. 

AI chatbots

AI-powered chatbots simplify agents’ work and streamline processes by assisting users in an online mode. Artificial intelligence can help with common queries, answer repetitive questions, provide information, check order status, or troubleshoot. Chatbots save time for users, allowing them to avoid long waiting in line and offer instant help. For agents, it means fewer calls with routine questions and an opportunity to focus on more complex situations.

Omnichannel support

If you offer omnichannel support, your users can interact with your customer service across multiple channels, including phone, chat, email, social media pages, etc. Instead of relying only on phone calls, customers will be divided between several communication channels. As a result, the waiting time and call volume will be reduced.

With seamless customer history across channels, users will not have to repeat themselves and can get help without getting frustrated. 

Optimizing call center operations

Workflow optimization is key to making call spike handling easier for your agents, as it allows them to arrange the work most efficiently and productively. How can you achieve it? We recommend focusing on two pillars of work optimization: 

• Call routing
• Urgent queries priority

Intelligent call routing is an AI-powered call center technology that helps sort incoming requests into efficient queues. Customers can use the interactive menu to provide information about call reasons, and artificial intelligence will evaluate all present individuals and groups of agents to choose the most suitable one. This approach ensures that all calls get to the right department and person who can fix the issue, avoiding transferring the call from one agent to another.

AI can also evaluate the call purpose and tone of voice to indicate urgent requests, making them the priority in the queue list. 

Communication and customer expectations

When it comes to matching customer expectations, we recommend the strategy of transparency and proactive communication. 

For example, if you experience an unusually high number of calls, you can inform callers about it, reducing the potential stress from long waiting times. Trained agents can politely let customers know about possible delays and offer solutions. Self-service chatbots can take some load and reduce the call volume, giving your agents a little break.

You can add more transparency with a few additional features for your call center:

• The estimated wait time will let customers know how long the answer could take, giving them clear expectations and more confidence in their response.

• Queue position updates will show where they are in the queue and how far they are from required assistance.

• The callback option is a great time saver for your customers, as instead of making them wait, you can offer to call back later.

Post-peak evaluation

The performance evaluation after the peak period is essential, as it will help you understand how successfully you handled the call spikes and how efficiently your company operates.

You can review call data to see average wait times, abandonment rates, and call resolution times to know how well your agents operated under pressure. It will help to identify the main bottlenecks. For example, you can see if the reason for delays is the lack of agents, system slowdowns, technology issues, or lack of knowledge. You will also be able to analyze how efficient your self-service options were and if you need to adjust anything. 

Customer feedback can serve as your guide for improvements. For example, customer surveys after interactions will demonstrate whether the waiting time was acceptable and whether the issue was resolved. Through complaint and trend monitoring, AI can indicate common pain points and show where the main problems are. Feedback from frontline agents can give you valuable insight into the effectiveness of scripts and problem-solving techniques. 

Based on data, you can adjust staffing, improve self-service solutions, and enhance agents’ training to be more prepared for the next time.

Conclusion

Call center call spikes can be extremely challenging for both your customers and agents, but workflow optimization makes the peak periods less stressful and more productive. We believe that forecasting, advanced training, extra staff, and AI-powered technologies can make a difference. Empower your company to handle even the most overloaded seasons more easily. With post-peak evaluation, you will always know what you can improve and how to raise service quality.