How Increased Holiday Traffic is an Opportunity to More Deeply Connect With Customers

Black Friday is just around the corner. The highly anticipated shopping event brings major opportunities for businesses to drive revenue and customer loyalty. Last year saw the biggest Black Friday in history, with shoppers spending a record $5 billion online in the 24-hour period. And it’s not just online retailers who benefitted: while there was a slight decrease in foot traffic from the previous year, Black Friday still brought 77 million people in-store.

Wherever customers shop, companies have a critical selling opportunity during Black Friday that will impact immediate and future sales. Businesses must track every touchpoint––mobile, web, email, text, chat and in-person––to extract the right insights to give customers the experiences they want. And, each of these touchpoints converges in one place: the contact center.

Data collected in the contact center informs companies how customers interact across channels, their agents perform and shoppers behave. Businesses can utilize these insights to keep customers coming back throughout the holiday season and the rest of the year.

Here are ways that increased traffic into the contact center on Black Friday leads to opportunities to more deeply connect with customers:

1. Segment customer behavior across channels

Though organizations likely have a strong quality assurance process when it comes to interacting with customers on the phone, Black Friday brings a high volume of customers ordering and communicating with companies online. In fact, this year, online shopping is expected to result in just under half of all gift purchases. By collecting and analyzing data from all customer channels including chatbots, email, live messaging and in-person, companies can create a consistent experience for customers at every point in the buying journey.

And, capturing customer interactions during Black Friday gives companies access to behavioral data for future use. Not only does this show which channels are most heavily trafficked, it shows how customers are interacting with the business. By understanding channel-specific questions and purchasing behavior, companies can create tailored strategies that cater to the individual needs of customers—no matter where they are.

2. Prepare for the holiday rush

Beyond collecting customer insights, reviewing key data such as interaction volume and sales input from last year’s Black Friday will inform businesses how to best staff their contact centers. Having the right tools to tell companies what channels customers are using to reach out provides a blueprint for scheduling staff to ensure customers get the information they need quickly and conveniently. Black Friday is just the beginning of the holiday shopping season, so with these insights on hand, companies can determine the best staffing approach for the rest of the year’s rush.

Businesses that collect contact center data also can analyze agent behavior. Using success metrics, they can pinpoint the strongest agents and implement best practices in staffing recommendations and training programs. This ensures the best agents are handling the busiest channels and most complex customer queries that come through and identifies where agents need more assistance and training ahead of the next major sales day.

3. Predict what customers will want

Companies can take interaction recording one step further with predictive analytics to identify each customer’s Net Promoter Score (NPS). Calabrio’s Predictive NPS can generate a score for every single customer through analysis of survey data alongside speech and sentiment data. Equipped with these insights for the holiday season, companies can identify and specifically incentivize their ‘top promoters’ to keep or convert them into loyal customers. For customers with a weaker NPS, companies can allocate more resources to win them over.

With advanced tools that analyze sentiment across channels, companies can also gain a sense of how customers feel about specific product lines and which products are favorable among shoppers. With this knowledge, marketing and sales departments can make strategic decisions and put their money in the right places this holiday season by pushing campaigns and promotions around their most popular products.

However, there is one unavoidable side effect of Black Friday: returns. At the end of every holiday season customers inevitably send back unwanted items, putting a dent in retailers’ revenue numbers. By analyzing holiday sales data and correlating it with return data, companies can be better prepared for next year. When companies are able to predict return rates, they can adjust product and sales strategies to reduce customer dissatisfaction—and future returns.

Black Friday can jump-start a company’s ability to bring in more than one-time sales. Rich customer interaction data from the contact center gives businesses the opportunity to evaluate overall operational effectiveness, identify who to target, where and how to reach them, and how to better staff agents for the next big sales event. With the right insights and subsequent actions, organizations can turn Black Friday shoppers into loyal customers.

Download our report to learn more about how forward-thinking contact centers are using multichannel analytics to unlock the insight from customer interactions and become a hub for business intelligence.

Tom Goodmanson

Tom Goodmanson, President and CEO of Calabrio, has more than 20 years of experience leading fast growing dynamic software and technology companies. Since assuming the CEO position in 2009, Tom is credited with reinventing the company and its culture around a strategy to expand value and reach through new, innovative products, and remarkable customer experiences. Addressing the market need for simpler solutions to complex customer interaction challenges, Tom’s vision to redefine the standard for software ease-of-use has been instrumental in making Calabrio one of the fastest growing companies in the industry.