How to Prepare for Black Friday: A Guide for Customer Experience Teams

Oct 9, 2024 | Articles, Customer Experience

Fall might just be starting, but customer experience and sales teams know better than anyone: holiday shopping is on the way. Now is the time to prep your teams for the Black Friday eCommerce rush.

Customer experience and sales reps have a stressful enough job as it is, and the Black Friday rush absolutely adds pressure. In 2023, a record number of shoppers took advantage of Black Friday deals; 200.4 million consumers shopped over the five-day Thanksgiving holiday weekend, beating 2022’s record of 196.7 million shoppers. Of those shoppers, 134.2 million shopped online, spending a record $9.8 billion.

If this year’s shoppers follow suit, sales and CX teams will have their hands full; reports show that shoppers increasingly expect fast, top-notch customer service and a seamless customer experience — even on the busiest shopping days of the year.

The Black Friday customer experience

Customer expectations are higher than ever. According to a recent report, 86% of agents say that customers expect more from reps than they have in previous years and 81% say customers expect a personal touch. Customer support professionals also report that customers seem more rushed. This tension between time-sensitivity and rising customer expectations may result in CX reps struggling to balance speed with quality service.

However, customers reward a strong customer experience; 88% of customers say that good customer service makes them more likely to buy again. With that in mind, how can CX teams provide that fast, personalized service when shoppers are out in force?

How to prepare CX teams for Black Friday eCommerce

Invest in strong onboarding

The holiday rush often means hiring additional staff to help your team with the increased call volume. However, you can’t just throw those new reps into the mix without a strong onboarding plan; research from The Recruiting Roundtable shows that a good onboarding program can increase performance by 11.5%. Start early with hiring and training: it can take a while for new employees to get up to speed. You want them to be calm, cool and collected when Black Friday rolls around.

Focus on training online customer service

Black Friday is often thought of as the biggest shopping day of the year, but that’s not strictly true. Adobe predicts that the biggest shopping day this season will actually be Cyber Monday as more shoppers turn to online retail during Thanksgiving weekend.

With that in mind, train your reps across several messaging platforms, and work on creating a seamless and personalized shopping experience with your reps across all of those online modalities.

Use microlearning to keep skills fresh

It’s not just your newest reps who need training. Even the most seasoned reps need a refresher sometimes. Agents might need to brush up on a product, take care of a complicated problem, or remember exactly how to escalate things to a manager. In these cases, offering microlearning — small, focused chunks of content that let your reps quickly brush up on one topic when they have a minute.

By maintaining a library of microlearning content, you’ll give your reps a searchable library of content right when they need it.

Train for soft skills, too

Your CX reps and salespeople do a lot, and they do it with a smile. Or at least they’re supposed to, but it can be hard to be cheerful and personable when you’re having a tough day. When reps need a little extra support, it’s important to offer soft skill training.

Also known as transferable skills, soft skills make a person pleasant to interact with. Soft skills include empathy, good listening and communication — all skills that CX reps need to provide exceptional service. Not every rep needs this training, but reinforcing these skills are an important step to providing an excellent customer experience.

Start early

As anyone who has found themselves on a retailer’s mailing list knows, Black Friday is no longer a one-day event. Nor is it a one-weekend event. In fact, some sales are expected to launch in mid-October. Now is the time to start training your reps on products, deals, and the skills they will need to impress the rush of holiday shoppers.

The sooner you start training, the more prepared every member of your team will be for Black Friday and the Thanksgiving weekend.

Support your reps with training before Black Friday

Your sales and CX reps don’t have it easy. Customer experience and sales reps deal with dissatisfied customers, high call volumes, and long hours.

It’s no wonder that call center reps have one of the highest turnover jobs in the world. Although there are no hard and fast numbers for the industry as a whole, the stat most often quoted, from the Quality Assurance and Training Connection (QATC), is that call centers have a turnover rate of between 30 and 45%.

Heading into the often stressful holiday season, it’s important to remember that your CX team may need more training. Offer as much of support you can give them, so that they can confidently represent your brand, now and during the busiest shopping day of the year.