We are only a few days away from Thanksgiving, do you know how to be prepared for Black Friday? For anyone focused on retail or e-commerce customer service, this is exactly when you need to be thinking of the winter months. Black Friday – the seasonal shopping bonanza of the holidays – is on the way.

Black Friday used to be a difficult date for most American businesses in the early twentieth century, as so many people called in sick the day after Thanksgiving – perhaps enjoying a little too much liquid gratitude, or just hoping for a long weekend. Black Friday wouldn’t be tied to post-Thanksgiving shopping until the late 1950s, when Philadelphia police used the term to describe the rowdy tourists that descended on the city before the Army-Navy football game, the snarling traffic, and overwhelming retailers. It didn’t take on its current more positive significance as America’s most popular holiday shopping day until the 1980s.

How to Be Prepared for Black Friday

In the US holiday season last year, shoppers spent $204.5 billion. That’s an 8.6% increase on 2020, which featured an exceptionally high level of e-commerce. Given the number of supply chain problems coming out of the pandemic in 2021, it’s impressive to see this level of growth. On 38 individual days of the holiday season, American shoppers spent over $3 billion per day.

This is when retail and e-commerce brands need to be completely on top of the customer experience (CX). You will be selling more, handling more questions and customer interactions, and processing more returns. If you are in retail or e-commerce, then you know that your volumes are going to increase across the board. You need to start planning right now to cover the customer interactions that will make your Q4 a success.

Learn how to be prepared for Black Friday. Here are three important points to consider:

1. It’s always about customer service and delivering exceptional support: As the number of shoppers increase, expect an exponential rise of calls to customer service, pre- or post-sales. Since customer loyalty is often the result of great customer interactions, Black Friday presents the perfect opportunity to attract, maintain, amaze, and retain customers through exceptional customer experience.
2. Ensure channel efficiency: In a fast-paced world, customers like convenience and quick service. Preparing for the Black Friday shopping frenzy means ensuring that all customer support channels – digital or traditional – are fully equipped to handle the volume of calls and customer contacts.
3. Leverage a high-tech, high-touch approach to invite customer satisfaction: Advanced technology such as automation, analytics, and RPAs have enabled retail and e-commerce companies to create efficiency and accuracy. Harness the power of these technologies and combine it with the best of human empathy and you may unlock the door to exceptional CX.
   
   

Soar Above the Challenges

A few challenges that accompany the rise of volumes during Black Friday are limited workforce and labor shortage. Companies can’t hire workers fast enough – in an article, the Wall Street Journal observed how there is an imbalance in labor supply and demand. The supply of available workers is heading in the wrong direction, especially if you are hiring now to cover the holiday season.

As a global leader in customer experience management, Teleperformance can help. With over four decades of experience, our teams can leverage and manage retail and e-commerce solutions globally using any channel, language, location, delivering urgency and quality at scale. Our 420,000-strong workforce can help your business soar above the challenges through Teleperformance’s high-tech, high-touch approach that blends the best technology with the human touch.

Let Teleperformance help you prepare for Black Friday, the holiday returns season, and beyond! Contact us today to learn more about our retail, ecommerce customer services and solutions.