Is your Contact Center ready for Black Friday?

Start the countdown for Black Friday 2017, one of the most important dates of global eCommerce and one of the clearest marks of the beginning of the holiday season. Its name originated in 1961, when the police officers of Philadelphia began to describe in these words the high traffic that took place the day after Thanksgiving.

Today, Black Friday has become an event full of discounts and promotions that, with only 5 years of antiquity in Spain, has already become a date marked in the calendars of marketing and sales departments of any business that is worth, being one of the days with the most important sales peaks of the year. In fact, electronic commerce in Spain reached record sales figures in 2016 during Black Friday, surpassing all forecasts. In particular, online sales increased by an average of 35%, according to data from the business logistics and transport organization UNO.

Sales forecasts for 2017 are very optimistic. So much so, that the experts of the sector predict that the Black Friday 2017 will be the year of the consolidation of this day of great offers. After a lustrum, this year the Black Friday will reach its commercial maturity and is expected to beat a record in the number of articles that are going to have discounts in Spain, an opportunity that many consumers will not let pass. Although we will have to wait to analyze sales after the celebration of Black Friday, November 24, the fact is that many buyers have been waiting for the Black Friday offers to buy quality products saving money.

Is your customer service center ready for Black Friday?

We have no doubt that the days around Black Friday will test the size, efficiency and effectiveness of your contact center. Therefore, your customer service center must be prepared to attend all the queries and ensure the best possible experience for your users. All this, optimizing to the maximum the available resources and analyzing the results in real time.

Here are some recommendations to maximize your sales and optimize your contact center resources during Black Friday:

• Hire a specific 900 or 902 number for your Black Friday campaign to isolate calls and give personalized attention to potential customers of your promotion. Configure intelligent routing to direct calls to different computers based on multiple criteria (geographical, time…).

• Facilitate contact with your users by adding voice applications to your own web page -like Click&Talk or Click-to-Call– and connect them to your contact center system.

• Manage all interactions with your customers through a professional cloud contact center solution for customer service.

• Configure your advanced ACD-IVR system (Interactive Voice Response) to reduce waiting time for your users, automate the most common queries, and optimize your processes.

• Trust a pay-per-use cloud communications solution, so you can dimension your contact center with total freedom, and pay only for the agents you need for a specific period of time.

• Provide your agents with a specialized module for receiving calls, with typing and reprogramming.

• Connect your telephone support system to your CRM, reducing response time, capturing information and closing orders.

• Keep track of your results and service level in real time with a specialized wallboard for supervisors.

In short, the success of your Black Friday depends on your power of attraction, but also on the effectiveness of your operations. Today’s professional contact center solutions in the cloud allow you to improve the ROI of your eCommerce. They offer more possibilities of communication to your users, build your team with specialized productivity tools, integrate perfectly with your website and your CRM, and provide the flexibility and efficiency you need.

Happy sales!