The few short days between Black Friday and Cyber Monday account for between 15.6% and 18.3% of all holiday season shopping sales that retail companies will see each year. That’s nearly one-fifth of their business conducted in one long weekend. In 2024, Salesforce reported that during Cyber Week there was a record-breaking $314.9 billion in global sales transacted – of which contact center agents and AI tools influenced $60 billion.
With so much of a retail business’ success riding on the revenue of the Black Friday / Cyber Monday weekend, it’s essential for consumer-facing retail companies to prepare their CX environments for a massive influx of contact requests well ahead of the holiday rush.
Contact center Black Friday readiness
To ensure your contact center is Black Friday ready, you should prioritize load testing and CX optimization in two key areas:
Want to make sure you’re ready on both of these crucial Black Friday prep fronts? Download a copy of the checklist below to keep your CX team on track ahead of the busiest week of the year.
Staffing and support
In our recent State of Contact Center Testing report, 41% of contact center professionals reported that their organizations had unrealistic expectations of their team. With the Black Friday / Cyber Monday rush of customer requests your already stressed contact center agents may be at a higher risk of human error, productivity loss, and even quitting. Adequate staffing and support for your contact centers help to reduce all of these risks.
Expand your recent Black Friday volume numbers by 10-20%
Forecast your staffing and scheduling needs based on customer contact volumes seen over the past few years. Whenever possible, anticipate an additional 10-20% increase in volumes in the current year and staff accordingly. Aside from revenue and traffic numbers, be sure to conduct an agent experience survey with your contact center team to assess the challenges they saw firsthand and get a jumpstart on finding resolutions.
Consider contracting a BPO for Cyber Week
A business process outsourcer (BPO) can help to augment your existing customer support team so that you don’t miss out on customer requests or potential revenue. Finding a good BPO for your business can take a while, but once you have a reputable team contracted and in place to support you through Black Friday and Cyber Monday on all of the contact lines (phone, SMS, email, and chat) that you need.
Monitor agent experience in real time
Detect performance issues in your remote agent networks to determine where home network instability may limit your agents’ ability to deliver the quality of customer service they’re expecting. Hammer’s agent experience management solution empowers you to identify and resolve performance issues in your network’s remotest regions now so they won’t be an issue in November.
End-to-end load testing
66% of CX professionals report that their call volumes are increasing. 73% report that chat volumes are, as well. With contact volumes and CX environment complexity both on the rise, the risk of poor customer service is growing too. Black Friday contact center teams should make a point to load test and stress test their entire CX tech stack well ahead of these real-world high-volume events to ensure performance is maintained in real-life situations.
Automated load testing
Hammer’s automated end-to-end load testing solution offers visibility into customers experience, application, and network performance using simulated customer traffic that replicates your real-world Black Friday demands across all contact channels and vendors.
Confirm new application integrations
Integrating new applications into your CX environment always risks data drops and flawed communications between components. Yet many retailers heading into the busy Black Friday season will rush to deploy new applications without properly testing their connection to the rest of the CX stack. With Hammer On-Demand Performance Testing, CX leaders can automatically perform QA testing on CX environments as they expand and evolve.
Automate common requests and questions
Prepare your AI-powered chatbots and agents with scripted answers for your most received questions and requests. This will accelerate a majority of your customer service interactions and free your agents up to handle both higher volumes of requests and more complicated customer concerns.
