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The only way businesses can make money is if they have enough products or services to sell. On the opposite end of the scale, they don’t want to make too many products that they simply can’t sell. With this in mind, here’s a look at how businesses deal with big increases in demand for their products.
Monitoring their calls
One of the most unexpected demands that a business might face from their customers is calls to their call center. This is also one of the demands where you as a business will be put under the most pressure. For example, if you’re a manufacturer and you run low on products, it’ll be the retailer that has to deal with the upset from the customer of not stocking enough of your product. When the customer is contacting you directly, whether it be to resolve a problem with a product or service they’ve bought from you or even to purchase a new product from you, it’s your responsibility to get this customer service right. That means that if the number of people calling your business increases, it’s important to try and make sure the time they’re waiting on hold to speak to someone doesn’t increase.
While businesses would love to employ a large number of call operators to deal with however many callers ring the business at any one time, each one of these employees is very expensive and can seriously affect their profit margins. Instead, many businesses rely on software like Aceyus customer service analytics, which can monitor the demand on call centers at all times. If a manager sees a big spike in demand from customers, they can then look to bring in more staff members until the wait time is brought down to an acceptable level.
Attempting to predict the market
Luckily not all increases in demand are unexpected. Many businesses employ experts to try and predict exactly how many of each product they’ll sell at any time. Obviously, some increases in demand will be more obvious than others. For example, garden centers sell a lot more outdoor furniture in the summer months whilst they sell a lot more Christmas trees in December. Once business owners receive these predictions, they can adapt how many products they are producing to meet the demand of the customer.
Being prepared to suddenly increase production
Sometimes, an unpredictable event can cause a surge in demand that a business simply wasn’t prepared for. For example, suppose an A-list celebrity is caught wearing a piece of clothing on camera. In that case, it could lead to a huge increase of customers that the business simply wouldn’t have got if the celebrity had worn a different outfit. Luckily, businesses can often quickly increase their production to deal with these problems as soon as they occur. As long as they don’t produce perishable products that go off quickly, most businesses have enough raw materials on standby to keep their production lines going through the night if necessary. A great example of this was when there was a surge in the demand for toilet paper when the coronavirus outbreak first hit.
