The busiest shopping day of the year
For many companies, Black Friday is the start of the Christmas sales, and for many, it's the most hectic shopping day of the year.
Just three days after Black Friday, it is Cyber Monday, another great opportunity for businesses to sell a lot of Christmas presents to consumers. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) as two of the biggest selling days of the year, it is incredibly important for businesses to be ready for these days and to perform at their best.
According to analysis from Adobe, in 2022 Americans alone spent$35.4 billion over the five-day Black Friday and Cyber Monday period. While this boost in consumer spending can go a long way to hitting your yearly goal, it also means that your company needs to be ready to deal with the increase in activity.
If you know how to properly inform and visualize this data for your employees and executives, then you can be the reason why your business will be successful this day and the years to come. If not, you can risk saying goodbye to an excellent opportunity to boost your performance. Fortunately, we've compiled four essential tips to help you get ready for 2 of the most important sales days of the year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Tip 1: Track your data in real-time
With the constant activity throughout Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it's important that you are visualizing your data in real-time.
Too many dashboard systems do not update or refresh often enough. There can be gaps between each update on your dashboards, and you may miss out on important decisions that required action right away.
For many eCommerce companies, their biggest fear is that their website can't handle the large number of website visitors on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In the past, even some of the biggest online retailers have experienced this problem.
To make sure this doesn't happen to your online store, make sure you have a widget on your dashboard that shows real-time traffic to your website. This way, you can see when there might be too many on your site or what product people are looking most at.
You can also use this knowledge to know when your support or sales department needs an extra hand as they may be under pressure. This also leads us to the next tips.
Tip 2: Create an overview across departments and channels
With thousands of happy customers, there will be some who will use the opportunity to chat, call or email you on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Therefore, you should have a dashboard showing how many missed calls, chats, and emails you have. The same goes for ongoing calls, conversations, and emails. One thing people tend to forget is also to show how many completed inquiries that have been made. It is essential to keep employees motivated, and it's more motivating to see one's completed calls than only the long queue of waiting customers.
If necessary, arrange in advance with other departments, who should step in and help the sales and support teams if they have too many inquiries. Make the dashboard visible to everyone by hanging up a TV that the whole office can see, so they understand when to be ready for change. Plecto has its own app on the LG TV AppStore, so we recommend a tv from them. Otherwise, you could use a device like the one from Airtame, to share your desktop screen.
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Tip 3: Celebrate the hard work of your employees
Whether your team is manning the phones, working on the shop floor, or a combination of both, the Black Friday weekend is undoubtedly one of the busiest and often most stressful times for your employees. Therefore, to ensure that employee motivation doesn't flag, it's important that their hard work is celebrated.
An easy way to do this is through gamification. Set up a friendly contest that displays which employees, team or store has sold the most or which employees have the best CSAT score. Remember to add notifications, so everyone on the team can stay in the loop.
Tip 4: Visualize only the most critical KPIs
Black Friday and Cyber Monday deserve their own dashboard. Many create dashboards that display data from the entire week, month, or quarter. For essential sales days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, your employees should not worry about the numbers of the week, but instead, focus on this one day solely. So pick a few critical retail KPIs to this day, that are relevant to all your employees, and make them visible to everyone, so they know how much to sell for today, serve customers or package and ship products.
Once these KPIs are selected, be sure to test them a week or two before Black Friday and Cyber Monday. You may have chosen some KPIs that you have not previously measured and that require your data to be changed, or you may need to set up a new tracking and tagging system to see if the customers are doing what you want them to. Therefore, test these things out beforehand, and if you are having trouble getting your data working, please write to us. Plecto's support is always happy to help you.
These were four tips from us. I know that there are a lot of other great tips that can help your business perform better for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. But when it comes to data, dashboard, and your employees, we think the above four tips are the most important ones.
