Editorial
The Gist
- Scalable CX Infrastructure. Retailers must ensure their contact centers can rapidly scale to handle massive spikes in customer inquiries during peak shopping periods.
- Omnichannel Consistency. Offering seamless movement across channels (phone, email, social, chat) prevents customer frustration and helps resolve issues faster.
- Smart Self-Service. Effective portals, FAQs and AI-powered self-service reduce support volume, but only if the underlying data is accurate and up-to-date.
Every year, retailers experience a surge in online sales between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Although physical stores still record an increase in footfall, the holiday shopping event is now dominated by online activity, with $15.8 million spent online every minute in the peak holiday hours of 2024.
When sales first began to shift online, retailers struggled to keep up with demand, suffering numerous notable outages across the busy shopping days. With years of experience, retailers now better manage spikes and navigate other common issues, but what pain points does the annual event create for CX teams and how can retailers ensure they are prepared to deliver their most seamless experiences during the busiest week of the year?
Black Friday Goes Digital
First originating in the US in the 1950s, Black Friday has become an international phenomenon. Initially, physical in-store sales saw long lines of customers looking for significant discounts. With the advent of the online world, the popular shopping week now looks very different.
Retailers work strategically to get the most out of the week, which kicks-off the wider holiday shopping season. Costco, H&M and Macy’s are just a few examples of brands that struggled with online performance during the peak period during its early years. With these peaks now expected and managed more effectively, serious issues have become less common.
Related Article: Retail Media Boom Comes With a Customer Loyalty Price Tag
Why Customers Contact Support During Peak Week
Higher sales result in a surge of traffic into retailers’ contact centers across the week. Ensuring customer needs are met efficiently and effectively is key to attracting and retaining business. After all, 32% of customers will shop elsewhere after just one bad experience, according to a PWC study.
Customers can reach out for several reasons at all stages of the purchasing process. Common drivers for reaching out could include:
- An offer code that was shared with the customer is flagging as invalid
- Inconsistent stock levels causing issues with purchased orders being fulfilled
- Payment processing issues
- Returns or exchanges queries
- Post-purchase issues, such as customers chasing incomplete orders or looking to make changes
3 Areas Where Retailers Must Strengthen CX
To best manage the influx of customers, retailers should focus on these key areas:
1. Ensuring Rapid Scalability to Meet Demand
One of the most common challenges associated with servicing an increased number of customers is the ability to scale. Retailers saw their websites crash due to an influx of visitors in the early years of Black Friday, and the contact center can buckle under pressure if it isn’t able to seamlessly scale.
Contact centers that run on rigid, on-premises infrastructure struggle to ramp up and accommodate increased demand. Cloud technology has relieved the pressure caused by rapid scaling, ensuring peaks can be met and customers aren’t turned away.
Sudden surges in traffic aren’t unique to retail, and these businesses can learn from other sectors that have proven an ability to scale usage without interruptions, such as utilities providers that must manage greatly increased volumes of interactions when the power cuts out. Simply being in the cloud isn’t a silver bullet to solving scalability challenges; retailers need to work with their CX provider to ensure their needs are understood and the correct protocols are in place.
2. Meeting Customers on Their Terms in a Coordinated Way
Customers now have more channels than ever by which they can reach a brand, from traditional methods like via phone to new and emerging digital and social options.
Allowing customers to reach out through their channel of choice is an important step to ensuring they enjoy a great experience. A multi-channel strategy can deliver customers a wealth of options, but omnichannel goes a step further, allowing for seamless channel shift and consistency, which could see a customer start an interaction on one channel and continue it on another, avoiding the need for customers to re-start their enquiry multiple times, which can be a source of frustration when moving between channels.
3. Delivering Effective Self-Service to Solve a Growing Number of Queries
Not all customers need to come through the contact center. For those seeking commonly requested information or wanting to make small changes to their order or account, self-service allows consumers to carry out tasks themselves. However, the correct infrastructure and information needs to be in place to allow the public to operate on their own, otherwise they will end up needing to contact an agent.
Updates that can be made through a portal combined with in-depth FAQs allow for customers to operate autonomously, but the growing impact of AI will open different self-service methods such as conversational and agentic AI. The information shared through AI agents will only be as strong as the data that sits behind it, so it is important to ensure that information is always up-to-date.
Related Article: The Chatbot Era Is Over and Agentic AI Has Arrived
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Compete on More Than Discounts
Consumers will be looking for the best deals across the week, but that doesn’t mean they expect budget experiences when they encounter an issue.
Whether it is a new or returning customer reaching out, retailers should use the holiday event to focus on key areas that lay the foundations for great CX across the board. By raising the bar for CX, they can win on more than just price and demonstrate why customers should be returning all year round, not just on Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
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