Anand Subramaniam, vice president of worldwide marketing at customer service and knowledge management solutions provider eGain, informed me that, no, making the return process difficult (e.g., shortening the return period, hiding the return policy in a dark corner on the Web site in hopes that people will give up on the whole ordeal and settle with their purchase) is not how you want to avoid product returns this holiday season. “It’ll only reflect badly on the brand and the retailer,” he says.

You’ve wooed your customers into the store and after careful — but not excessive — attention, they finally buy something. Perfect.

But what if it they get home and don’t know how to use it? What if it doesn’t fit the neice they haven’t seen in two years? What if after all that trouble, they found it on sale somewhere else and want to save that extra $19.99?

It happens.

“Consumers often return, to no fault of the products, if they’re unable to figure out how to use them,” Subramaniam says. What’s worse is that contact center agents are unable to help them solve the problem due to lack of knowledge. As a result, customers often resort to returning the product and with policies that guarantee free return shipping, it can be a costly expense for manufacturers and retailers.

Maybe it was where I went during the Thanksgiving break, but sales I saw were so-so (I did not dare enter Walmart), and stores were disappointingly empty. Even so, the Bloomingdale’s where my parents live hit its numbers for the weekend, according to the salesman I spoke to. As if the reports we receive almost daily aren’t enough to verify that fact that people are shopping less, my weekend only affirmed those findings. So when you do get your customers to buy, your next challenge is making sure they’re buying for keeps.

Subramaniam shared his tips on how to prevent or reduce the number of returns you get this holiday season.

1) Educate your consumers. Make sure they know what they’re buying: how it works, what’s included, what’s needed, etc.

2) Empower contact center agents with knowledge. One client, a mobile operator in Europe, has been able to reduce unwarranted handset exchanges by 38 percent, using eGain’s KM solution. Another eGain client, a manufacturer of home appliances, reduced the number of “truck rolls” for field service, saving them about $50 million dollars annually.

3) Deploy your contact center knowledge base out to the retail stores and give your brick-and-mortar retail agents access to it.

4) Work with suppliers that produce high quality products and track this with quality metrics and metrics around returns.

5) Low price guarantees. Do some secret shopping and scope out the competition. Make sure you’re not out in left field when it comes to pricing. Many retailers offer a price-match guarantee.

6) Increase the availability of social knowledge on your products. Encourage customer to get self-help through community forums or product reviews. EGain has seen manufacturers and retailers harvest social knowledge, sanitize it, and publish it on their own Web site.

7) With its knowledge management tool, eGain aims to help the service engineer determine the right parts and tools needed in order to achieve a “first visit resolution,” whereby, if a visit to the customer is necessary, the goal is to resolve the problem by the first visit.

8) Engage in proactive customer service. Send out an email/voice/SMS alerts telling the customer the status of the return/shipment, so that you reduce the number of inquiries coming in and the cost of returns processing.

9) Once the return is happening, the only thing you can do is optimizing returning process. Integrate it with your backend supply chain systems. Provide unified multichannel service (phone, email, chat). Make sure call center agents have a full view into the process (when it shipped, where it’s located, when the new product will arrive, etc.) so if a customer calls, they have the answers.