Forrester Research reports that 90 percent of online shoppers consider good customer service critical in choosing a Web merchant. In the past few years, customer service debacles — particularly those surrounding the holidays — have slammed the reputations of many online companies.

Are you ready to handle the holiday onslaught?

To find out, work through the following activities with your team. These steps will help you define the state of your customer service readiness, and to find weaknesses you can fix in time for the rush.

Who's Calling?

Typically, less than one customer query arrives for every order placed online. However, during the holiday season, industry standard ratios balloon to more than four service interactions per order. Projections are key for planning your needs because the phone calls-to-orders ratio affects your costs, which in turn affect your company's financial performance.

To make projections, look at previous holiday sales numbers or check sales numbers from companies comparable to yours.

Once you project anticipated order volume, multiply that number of orders by the number of calls and e-mails you expect for each order. The more complex a product you sell, the more customer service time it requires. Therefore, I recommend running the numbers on several scenarios, from one inquiry for every four orders up to four calls for every order.

Assume it will take your customer service staff 15 minutes to reply to a phone call and five minutes to reply to an e-mail message. Using these numbers, you can calculate how many people you'll need to manage your contact volume.

To sum up, the number of expected orders times the number of customer contacts per order equals your total contact volume.

Then: total e-mail contact volume times five minutes, plus total phone contact volume times 15 minutes, equals the total customer service minutes required for staffing.

Man the Front Lines

Will you have in-house customer service representatives or outsourced reps? Finding employees in this hot economy is tough, especially around the holidays. Draw up a written plan that specifies which employees or contractors will perform which responsibilities. Distribute it to your team, get everyone's feedback and have everyone agree to a plan.

Remember, there won't be time to change the plan in the heat of the holiday rush.

The outlined responsibilities for each person should account for everyone's hours and should specify who picks up the phone, who answers e-mails, who responds to late delivery inquiries, who handles billing questions, how complaints are passed up to a manager, and any other question you foresee.

It's easy to get caught up in the moment and forget to track volume. Therefore, one person should have the responsibility of keeping track of overall contact volume and inquiry subject matter. This will give you a head start on preparing for next year.