A Detail Guide for Black Friday eCommerce

For eCommerce retailers, the Black Friday presents a win-win situation. With online merchandise worth $209.7 billion waiting to be sold, it’s time to strategize your tactics and bank on the opportunities.

Whether you go for influencer campaigns, social media ads, or special deals for Black Friday, you need to ensure a strong shopping experience.

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This will help in transforming your visitors to clients.

So, here’s what eCommerce retailers need to do:                           

•       Strategize a seamless checkout mechanism
•       Mention the online policies lucidly
•       Answer the queries of customers efficiently

Currently, online retailers are leveraging the power of analytics. This helps them understand the pulse of potential client bases and tweak their marketing strategies accordingly. Deploying just 20% of the actions can help you drive 80% of the results when you embrace smart analytics.

5 strategies to enhance customer experience during Black Friday

Here are some strategies that should help eCommerce retailers drive their customer experience.

• Chat menus with self-service option: With self-service chat menus available on your website, you can minimize the ticket volume from customers significantly. Around 20% of the queries that online shoppers raise get resolved instantly. This way, you can entrust the customer support agents to deal with higher priorities.
• Handling large volumes of tickets: The volume of tickets inflates manifold during festive seasons like the Black Friday. Efficiently clearing the ticket backlog, you can enhance the shopping experience of their customers. Besides, if your customers come up with urgent queries during the pre-sale period, make sure to resolve them quickly.
• Update your FAQ page: A dedicated FAQ page significantly helps customers find answers to common questions. Smart analytics should help you identify commonly asked questions. Update your FAQ page with relevant answers to these questions. This way, you can reduce the number of tickets loaded with queries. Entrust your customer support team to deal only with complex tickets.
• Use templates and automation rules: Deploying visually appealing templates, your customer support team will be able to deal with customers effectively. Along with this, automated software can help in handling a higher number of customers and lead to faster checkouts.
• Use proactive live chat: During the peak sales seasons like Black Friday, using the proactive live chat feature can help eCommerce retailers run live chat campaigns. This way, you can reach out to potential customers with your discounts faster. Besides, you can get across to casual browsers with valuable information. This will lead to greater conversion rates.

With these guidelines, you can leverage the competence of your helpdesk. As the holiday season approaches, you have the opportunity to leverage your support infrastructure and deal with your clients.

Additional guidelines for eCommerce retailers to manage customers

Experts provide certain recommendations that can work in your favour. Display your company’s policies on important marketing elements and visual platforms. These include:

•   Your confirmation emails
•   Macro templates
•   Your FAQ page
•   The checkout flow
•   Products page
•   Banner display

It’s imperative to come up with strong policies on the following aspects. Make sure to display these policies in conspicuous spaces on your website.

•   Fulfillment and shipping policy related to gifts and rewards so that they reach the respective destinations at the right time
•   Comprehensive exchange and return policy that covers late item delivery, mismatch of items and customer expectations, wrong product shipping, damaged product delivery, etc.
•   Lost package policy with features on coverage limit, whether or not the lost package is under coverage, how customers should initiate the process, definition of lost packages, and how to mitigate issues like lost packages. It would be wise to include these clauses on the FAQ page.

How to tweak your FAQ page to support customers?

•   Review historical helpdesk tickets to understand the queries that commonly come up
•   Provide lucid and concise answers to these questions
•   Maintain an intuitive navigation system so that the FAQ page remains clean
•   Ease up the process of finding questions for customers to their queries
•   Place all the commonly asked questions at the top
•   Focus more on page speed, clarity, SEO, searchability, and customer experience
•   Refresh and update your web pages from time to time
•   Connect these pages to confirmation emails that you dispatch post-sales. This would make your customers aware of your company policies.

How to tweak self-service facilities on your website?

Integrating self-service features on your website can reduce customer queries by 30%. Automated features on your website should handle such customer queries. With an automation add-on, you should have at least four menu items, as follows:

•   Order returning
•   Tracking orders
•   Canceling orders
•   Reporting issues with orders

It’s imperative to focus on conversions that generate higher revenue. Accordingly, you need to address the tickets instantly to maintain a responsible profile. Successful eCommerce retailers are proactive in forecasting ticket volumes based on analytics that give an insight of the historical volumes. Accordingly, eCommerce managers can hire the required number of agents to ensure productivity. With the right agent capacity, you remain well poised to deal with query upsurges.

Managing Black Friday priorities: How to optimize customer support efficiency?

Being informed about the potential workload is imperative, so that your customer support desk can remain prepared for the challenge. You can optimize the customer support desk by adhering to the following guidelines.

•   Appreciate the agents for their consistent efforts
•   Informing the agents about chances of working overtime beforehand
•   Offering incentives to your agents for their commitment while working overtime

Many eCommerce retailers prefer outsourcing their customer support team to enhance their workforce. Look out for reputed agencies where the agent turnover rate is less than 10%.

Additional guidelines to prepare for Black Friday

It’s highly recommended to update your SLA, that would keep the transactions safe. With the right set of tools, the agents will be able to understand the requirements of customers. At the right time, you would be able to gauge the success of your customer support team in meeting the expectations of your customers. A data-driven approach in your SLA and using simple English will help your customers. Besides, it makes sense to plan ahead to address emergencies like customer spikes and website crashes.

Lastly, focus on reducing the rate of your shopping carts being abandoned. This way, you can capitalize on the opportunities on Black Friday. Forward-thinking eCommerce retailers have already deployed these strategies as they brace up for the festive season.