Black Friday: How business should be preparing

Data from last year shows that while South Africa’s Black Friday activity was muted overall, shoppers are increasingly going online.

Black Friday has evolved from being a single day to a month-long sales event that places considerable demand on South African retailers, their staff and their systems.

In the run-up to this period, here’s what you should be doing to ensure both your business and your customers are getting the most out of the experience.

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Read: Is it time to re-imagine Black Friday in the African context?

Data from last year shows that while South Africa’s Black Friday activity was muted overall, shoppers are increasingly going online for Black Friday sales.

Preparing your sales systems

In the run-up to Black Friday 2024, it’s important to bolster and test your online offering to ensure that your website and payment systems can withstand traffic peaks caused by more people shopping online.

Global Salesforce data from last year showed that 79% of cyber week e-commerce traffic came from mobile phones – more than ever before.

In a country where people spend almost a third of their waking hours on their mobile devices, South African retailers who are not optimising their sites and their marketing for mobile will find themselves left behind.

Boosting your customer support systems

With the focus on sales, everything that happens in the lead up to and after a customer hits the checkout button might be forgotten. Price may be the main driver for shoppers during Black Friday, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t deliver effective service which will see them returning long after the Black Friday sales are done.

Research by World Wide Worx, conducted in 2022, found that managing customer queries and complaints is the single biggest concern for retailers during busy holiday periods.

Black Friday leads to a surge in customer queries and support requests ranging from stock and availability queries to complaints, returns and refunds. One study in the UK found that almost a third of purchases were returned in the wake of Black Friday sales so retailers, logistics companies and banks need to scale up their support teams and ensure that their communications infrastructure can handle the spikes.

For businesses that are using Cloud-based PBX systems, this might simply mean understanding the power of your system and making use of all the available features. Features like call routing ensure that customer calls are directed to the right person or department while queue management features allow callers to hold or calls to be distributed across a team of people in the event of call spikes.

Listen/read: The rise and rise of online shopping in SA

Integrating your phone system with CRM systems will also make the whole experience more seamless because your teams have the information and tools available to quickly resolve queries.

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In a ‘returns’ scenario for instance, an agent with access to the original delivery details, can simply book the collection from that address rather than having a customer repeat all their details – making for a more efficient call.

Preparing your teams

Black Friday isn’t just a single day anymore – it has become a month-long event. On the one hand, this spreads out the pressure and reduces the size of spikes, but on the other, customer support teams will be working harder for a sustained period of time.

Black Friday marks the start of the busy festive season, so training additional human resources now and working out team schedules is important to ensure people don’t burn out.

Analysing historic website, sales and call data will allow you to identify trends – for example when spikes happen – and allow you to better plan for this year.

It may sound strange, but your phone system can actually help with shift scheduling too. Real-time analytics allow managers to track call volumes, so that they can deploy resources like additional staff members or chatbots to better manage workloads as they rise.

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Preparing for Black Friday goes beyond boosting sales systems. A smooth and efficient customer experience – whether that means minimising hold times, managing returns effortlessly, or ensuring support staff are well-prepared – can have a lasting impact on customer retention.

With the right tools businesses can scale up, manage spikes and ensure that no team member is overextended.

Warren Hawkins is managing director of Euphoria Telecom.

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