Rethinking Retail: Lessons from Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Retail Magic: Your Outsized Impact on the Holidays

First of all, thank you retailers big and small! You are fulfilling the vital role of Santa Claus and his elves by providing the goods and services that go under the tree, are gifted in the light of Hanukkah, and exchanged with love in any other fashion at any of the many holidays celebrated around the world. You make the magic happen for children and families, and Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are a major part of that.

But not every experience is magical. As you continue to perfect your customer experience in store, online, and anywhere else, there is always room for improvement. BFCM is a unique opportunity to gather a lot of data on how your customers behave in peak retail season. So, maybe next year. After all, Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) of 2023 are over. Or are they?

The Black Friday and Cyber Monday Battleground

BFCM is the pinnacle of the retail year, a period of intense consumer activity and fierce competition. However, what’s often overlooked is that this time is crucial for retailers who want to perfect their CX strategies, maximize sales, and build lasting customer relationships. It also sets up the busy month of December, even if the peak of BFCM is higher than other days. The data you collect during and the actions you take after Black Friday and Cyber Monday can have enormous impact.

Now you may be wondering, “If BFCM is such a unique time, with so many unusual psychological factors at play, what can I learn from it that will be useful in the rest of the year?” I’m so glad you asked. The answer is twofold. Firstly, active and passive listening and analytics over Black Friday and Cyber Monday can help you plan better for next year’s BFCM. These insights are far reaching and can impact everything from manufacturing and fulfillment to merchandising and staffing. Secondly, the experiment you conduct every year during Black Friday and Cyber Monday can reveal information that might be hidden in “baseline,” rest-of-the-year data.

If you know how to use the data it generates, BFCM can be a true goldmine of information as you continue to refine and iterate your retail CX strategy. By listening everywhere, including to customer behavior in-store and online, using retail choreography to orchestrate a more seamless retail experience, and building agile and innovative CX automation, your brand can do more. More sales, more satisfied customers, and more reliable results are all possible when you can get those three factors right.

Listening to Consumer Behavior During Peak Retail Shopping

It’s one thing for me to say listen during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but doing so is another matter.

You need the ability to survey at scale, to listen to customer behaviors and attitudes, to triage customer complaints and issues, and to collect that data in a way that’s usable by the wider organization. Now you need to do it on all digital channels, in-store, at curbside pickup and BOPIS (buy online pickup in store) locations, and even in the contact center. How is this possible? By listening everywhere.

Here are a few ways you can listen, even during peak retail shopping season:

• Post-purchase feedback. Capture this data with surveys, on receipts or in emails.
• Predictive modeling. See how changes to your customer journey will impact revenue and more.
• Synced digital feedback and geo-location. Get store-level data from buyers and non-buyers.
• Standard KPIs. Measure against industry benchmarks and collect advanced insights.
• Linked metrics. Identify how struggle, effort level, and other factors contribute to your CX.
• AI-powered chatbots. Use crafted triggers and intents to know when to survey and how to act.
• Voice and Text Analytics. Understand trends in both structured and unstructured feedback

By using the tools listed above together, you can generate a 360 view of your customers with data that will carry on in the coming months and years.

Retail Choreography: Orchestrating a Seamless Omnichannel Experience

Once you have the data on your customers’ behavior, it’s time to act on it. Today’s consumer is more vocal and impatient than ever. Multiply this by the stress of the BFCM rush and you’re looking at the people walking away from your store at the slightest inconvenience. If you don’t have the right tools in place, this is a very real experiential risk. What can you do to cater to the needs of your customers and drive sales in this busy period without breaking the bank?

One answer is to leverage Verint Retail Choreography. an omnichannel CX strategy that can help you better plan and control the movement of your customers across channels. Using Retail Choreography solutions, you can manage all your customer and associate activities and analyze what’s going on in your stores. Here’s how:

• You can enable your customers to schedule appointments for your services 24/7, from any communication channel with Verint Appointment Booking. This lets you capture the customer’s intent for the appointment so that you can offer a personalized service and send them tailored email or SMS reminders to increase appointment attendance.
• Get rid of physical lines or queues in front of your stores by creating a more relaxed and informed waiting experience for your walk-in customers with Verint. They can easily join the queue from a QR code scan, a kiosk, or a store greeter. You can keep them updated on their wait times and position in line and allow them to browse or run other errands until their time to be served comes up.
• Use Event Management, to help your customers easily find and register for your events to drive customer engagement and brand loyalty.
• And finally, supervise the workload across all your stores with Task Management, by managing tasks on any device and monitoring their progress with real-time notifications.

Building a Futureproof Retail CX Strategy: Embrace Agility and Innovation

If you’re listening to your customers and choreographing your retail experience, what comes next?

With the data collected while listening to the consumer, you need to analyze deeper to transform this data into actionable insights and changes to the business. You can further break this process down into two key pieces. Understanding and action.

Understanding

Understanding can come from a combination of deeper analytics, like those available from Verint Voice of Customer Solutions, like digital behavior analytics and predictive modelling. Another source is by using AI to extract insights.

For example, post-call wrap up and other bots can have a massive impact on how your team works, summarizing long conversations, and pulling unstructured data into a consumable format.

Not only that, by analyzing those conversations and summaries for further insights with text analytics, you can get even more value from the same conversations you’re already having.

Action

Action, meanwhile, comes in many forms.

From your employees helping a customer based on their feedback, to redirecting customers when you detect website struggle, the ways you can act on customer feedback are highly varied.

To be agile though, you need to streamline processes and enhance your efficiency with CX automation.

One way is using the bots we mentioned above, but other ways include triggering a survey at the right time on the web, generating alerts for stores when items are low in stock, and much more.

It is only by testing ideas, listening everywhere, and analyzing across channels and time that you can reach your full potential as a retail organization.

You Shouldn’t Buy Clearance Bin VoC and CX Software

“GNC is a big company with many moving parts, but we’re all seeing the same feedback data, so we can coordinate and respond as one. Our customers have noticed, and we have clear evidence that the changes we made have had a positive impact on sales.” – GNC

Stocking stuffers are a hallmark of the season, but there is an art to getting the right ones.

Something that’s single-use or that will leave the recipient wishing they had a better version is never a better gift than the slightly more expensive, far more capable alternative.

One lesson we must all take from Black Friday and Cyber Monday is that quality does matter. Consumers want a great deal on good products. If BFCM was about buying worse products for a slightly lower price, it wouldn’t have the retail impact it does today.

When it comes to your software and solutions, everyone wants to unwrap a big box of Verint Voice of Customer Solutions. Even if you only want to stuff your stockings with Verint Bots, you can rest easy knowing that you’re getting a great deal on a high-quality product.

If you want to learn more about Verint and how you can deliver incredible Retail CX to your customers all year round, check out our Retail CX Holiday Guide and the In-Location CX Maturity Model. Both are full of relevant information for perfecting your customer journey, wherever customers interact.