Mastering Black Friday and Cyber Monday: Your Ultimate Contact Center Superbowl Playbook

00:00Hi, guys. Tom Laird here. You've heard me break down contact center technology on the podcast time and time again. Now, it's time for me to help you with your challenges. As your contact center technology advisor through our new company, Expivia Digital, I can help you with things like CCaaS selection, any type of AI implementation, and nice studio and integration services. It's the same honest advice you hear on the geek applied specifically to your operation. Visit ExpiviaDigital.com to get started. That's ExpiviaDigital.com. This is advice from a call center geek, a weekly podcast with a focus on all things call center. We'll cover it all from call center operations, hiring, culture, technology, and education. We're here to give you actionable items to improve the quality of yours and your customer's experience. This is an evolving industry with creative minds and ambitious people like this guy. Not only is his passion call center operations, but he's our host.

00:54He's the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing Group and the call center geek himself, Tom Laird. Welcome back everybody to another episode of advice from a call center geek, the call center and contact center podcast, we try to give you some actionable items to take back in your contact center, improve the overall quality, improve the agent experience, hopefully improve your customer experience as well. My name is Tom Laird. I am the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing. We're about a four 500 seat contact center outsourcer located here in the United States, also the CEO of auto QA, where we are fully using AI to fully score contact center quality. How's everybody doing? It's been a while. I've been slammed. The auto QA stuff has really been taking a lot of our time as we look to scale. So many cool things have happened with that from getting some Ben Franklin Technology Partner funding and really adding a lot to the platform.

01:53So again, I apologize. This is supposed to be a weekly podcast and I promise I will get back to this, you know, starting here now. This work kind of winding down to the end of the year. So speaking of the end of the year, I kind of do this annually and I want to do it again. Normally do it at the kind of more the beginning of November. But you know, we're about a week and I guess a day or two days away from, I guess three days from from Black Friday and in Cyber Monday, when I kind of call those, you know, Super Bowl call center Super Bowl. So I wanted to kind of go over some of the things that we do at Expivia, to make sure that we are fully prepared for our clients for Black Friday. And again, I think there's a lot of things that you can take from this to make sure that, you know, you're you have everything tied up, we still have a week, we're gonna have to go. So there's there's time here to make sure that you can kind of go through this checklist to make sure that your contact center if you're especially if you're a retailer, or you're an outsourcer that you're you're prepared. Right. So let's get into this again, we are live on tik tok on Facebook on LinkedIn. If you have any questions, if anybody joining this, you know, please, if you if you have anything that you want to ask, shoot it out to me. And you know, we'll kind of get to it. Alright, I got about let's see 1234 1011 ish items that I want to go over to make sure that you are as prepared as you possibly can be for for kind of this onslaught of calls that happen especially to a lot of the retailers so number one is especially right now hold off on your IT updates hold off on any updates that you you want to rush to the floor at Expivia we do about a 30 day it was 30 days we kind of just now say November 1st we do not do any major platform updates to our telephony to any CRM. We try to hold off on anything that could throw a loop when we're getting absolutely inundated with calls from customers.

03:58If you have anything, I would say this is your last week. Don't do anything next week. Don't do anything crazy. A lot of times IT wants to push some things out. Make sure you hold off until really that December 1st. That's almost the number one way that we've made mistakes in the past. You're trying to get something up quickly for a client and then when we go into that day, there's a bug, there's an error and you can get underwater really, really fast. So number one is easy on the IT updates, whether it's your CRM, whether it's any AI stuff, easy, all right? Number two is, you know, I kind of say shrinkage management. You got to really think this stuff through. And, you know, if you're an enterprise, I'm sure that you have, you know, your call forecast from the previous years, you are understanding by interval, how many calls, you know, for all of our customers, we're set by interval of what everyone, where we should be staffed.

04:59And we plus that up a little bit on our shrinkage, right? So, you know, if we have a 10 to 15% shrinkage for specific intervals, we might move that up to 20% to make sure that we are staffed. These are the days that you don't wanna make any mistakes. You really don't wanna cut things close. These are make or break days, especially for our customers on the retail side. We have to make sure that we have even a little bit of availability, if not availability, make sure that that queue isn't gonna be really, really, really crazy. So again, really take a look at that. If you don't have a forecast from previous years, you should be able to, if you have an Erlang C, make sure that you really understand what your staffing should be. And I would say to plus that up maybe 5% to 7% to 10% to make sure that, again, if you're a retailer, especially if you're a new SaaS platform, if something that is new, really start to plan for that from a from a scheduling adjustment.

06:09Again, and again, staffing is everything right in the in the contact center. So just making sure that you understand what your peak intervals, intervals are, you understand that, you know, are you is it going to be more in the morning? Is it going to be more that lunchtime is the afternoon? Are you going to struggle? You know, at lunchtime, do you have to really kind of play out schedules a little bit more? Just make sure you're very comfortable with that. It's not business as usual. I guess that's the main point, right? It's not a normal Friday, it's not a normal Monday. And normally, in a lot of conduct centers, Fridays are the lightest days, right? So that's going to be a whole different ballgame when you get to kind of, kind of those days. The next thing is, have fun, you got to have fun with this, right? So we like to really, you know, engage and motivate. Don't let your team get stressed out. You should be talking about some motivations and some cool things that you're doing now, right, to kind of get people a little bit excited. It can be fun, right? You know, you can, you can kind of Jedi mind trick again, I use that phrase a lot. But you can do that to your agents to make it to make it be a little bit more fun, you know, have incentives, you know, whether it is, you know, based on the quality based on how many I don't want to say calls that they're taking, right, because that can get us into some some issues. But again, schedule adherence, you know, those type of things that are really, really important. I think, you know, can go a long way to lessening your shrinkage, and also keeping your agents up having higher sentiment, having a higher performing agent, you know, as the as that day goes. And again, Monday can be worse, like Black Friday, people are like, all right, you are coming off Thanksgiving. So again, you got to be careful with that. A lot of times now, we have Thanksgiving staffing, But that Monday for Cyber Monday, you just got hammered on Friday, agents maybe, some of them are working Saturday, I don't know, maybe they're working Sunday, maybe they're off, but then Monday is going to be huge again.

08:08And if you're not having fun with it, if you don't have some cool things, again, you're going to see your shrinkage, you're going to see your callouts go up a little bit more. So make sure that you have something in place, whether that's the agents kind of getting involved with it that's going to have a little bit of fun because that's going to be really important especially when they're getting getting bombarded. The other thing that we would do and again we're all work from home now but you know back in the day too we would always have you know more snacks pop right because the people are talking having that stuff available I say pop from Northwestern PA instead of soda you know those kind of things I think you know can be can be really important. [pricing remark omitted] Send that stuff out a little bit ahead of time.

09:04It goes a long way to really helping make these things really smooth and have a little bit of fun. Alright, you need to, you know, prepare for overflow. So here's some mistakes that we we have made in the past is, again, being a CCaaS platform, a lot of times with a lot of the providers, you have a certain amount of ports, right? So making sure that if you're going to queue or you're expecting a giant queue no matter what, make sure that you have enough ports available. No one wants to be, you know, going out of ports because you have 150 calls or 200 calls in queue, you only have 75 ports, and calls are just either nobody's getting through, that's a disaster. Now you can always kind of update that stuff on the fly, but don't, right? So talk to your CCaaS providers, make sure that there's some things in place for that.

09:59And make sure, make sure, make sure that you're offering virtual callbacks, right? There's still time to get those in place. It's not very difficult to do. Again, if you're using like a nice CXone and you're not sure how to do that, just let me know. I'll send you the studio code for that. But everybody should have a virtual callback, especially if you're planning on large queues, right? Number one, it saves you on your minutes, right? So it's a cost saver for you because you're not paying for people in queue. And number two, more importantly, it's not gonna really tick off customers that much. They understand that it's a crazy busy day. So if there's some outlets that they can go to and utilize without having to just hang on hold, You know, that's going to help you a lot as well. Look at your IVR, right?

10:51You know, a lot of times throughout the year, we make a lot of adjustments and it's fine when there's kind of minimal volume, but make sure that you fine tune it and you're going through those processes, right? Have somebody call and say hit one, or if you're using kind of some AI bot, go through, You know, the main things that your customers are going to deal with, is there a mistake somewhere? Are they going to the proper places? Did you set up extra skills, right, to set up or cues for Black Friday that maybe your IVR is not recognizing? Like these are all mistakes that I've made, right? So, you know, throughout these 20, 25 years, making sure that everything is aligned and that everybody's talking to each other. Because again, in a lot of larger companies, people add on to the IVR and there's not a kind of a one overall kind of arching process to make sure that those calls are going to the right places or from a self-service standpoint that they're getting handled the proper way.

11:55The other thing is if you have analytics and it's kind of like half set up, you have a week and a half to get that thing to be able to collect as much data as you possibly can. This is a data rich two days. you're gonna talk to probably more customers for a lot of contact centers than you do sometimes all year long, right? Definitely more in one day than you normally do. So when you take Friday and Monday's call volume, you know, there's a lot of data that you can get from customers. So if you're an outsourcer, that's a treasure trove of gold that we can give to our customers. You know, the cool thing again with us using auto QA is we're gonna score a ton of calls for agent behavior, but for all of our clients, we're going to score so many calls on analytic questions.

12:42Again, what is auto QA? We're just asking questions of data. So we want to know why are customers canceling? Why are they purchasing something? Do they like the color of this more than this? Are they talking about different competitors? All of this kind of analytic data that if you have an analytic platform, make sure that it's fine-tuned, make sure that you're ready to capture as much data as you possibly can because it's really two days that are really cool sales days and you can get so much data from most few days. The other thing that we have found is that we document the day, right? We've made a lot of mistakes, you know, everybody does throughout the years. And again, not big mistakes, but you do like little things that you're just like, oh man, why did we do that, right? So we kind of document the journey of the day.

13:33We document what mistakes or what things do we wanna, and I shouldn't even say mistakes, But what things do we wanna do a little bit better last year? And that's been a kind of a journey for us to get better every single year when it comes to these. And it's getting better overall, but really when you have high call volume, when your systems are stressed, you can learn the most. So I think, you know, make sure that you have either somebody that is kind of writing things down, keeping a track record, it's invaluable, you know, the insights that you're gonna get. If you don't have a workforce management platform, start to look at and jot down, even in Excel, how's the call volume coming in? I know a lot of us don't, like we think that everybody has these robust platforms, but a lot of people don't.

14:16So keep track of kind of, even if you're old school of how much call, how many calls are coming in, that's gonna really help you next year when you're like in the same spot, like I'm not sure how it's gonna work. At least you have a working document that you can kind of utilize. And I think that the meetings are really important too, right? Starting your meetings now, making sure everybody's on the same page, making sure that everybody's scheduled, even from a management standpoint, from an IT standpoint, who's gonna be on call late at night that maybe normally you don't really need, but now you're gonna have a huge or large piece of your staff still going at one or two in the morning. There's a lot of things that you don't think about that you need to kind of do. And then, you know, on Tuesday, sit down with your team when you can maybe breathe for a little bit and kind of have a debrief.

15:06Like, I think that those have been some of the most, the coolest learning portions that we've done is kind of having those debriefs where, you know, we kind of talked about what worked, what didn't work, what do we want to do next year? And then kind of start the plan almost for next year as we go. And the other thing is you're getting into the holiday season. So if you're a retailer, you know, it's not like two days and you're done, right? You're going to continue this kind of higher paced, You're normally through February, right? Because then you get cancels and you kind of get all of those things in returns. If you're a retailer, you know, that happened in that January timeframe. So those are just some of my thoughts. Those are some of the things that I think about every Black Friday. Again, we're moving to probably a little bit more of a self-service kind of AI world, which again, this year could maybe cause some issues because, you know, a lot of you are kind of, you know, putting your toe into the AI world.

15:58So just make sure that you have the support behind it, that it's easy to get to an agent, that you have the support staff there and available. Again, if not, we got a week and a half, you need an outsourcer, you know, you need an overflow of 10 agents or 20 agents or five agents or two agents, let me know. And I can, I can, I'm sure we can, we can help you out a little bit as through the, through the holiday season as well here at Expivia. But I hope this helps to kind of just do this little bit every year. Again, I love talking about AI, but it's kind of nice to kind of get back to the to the contact center stuff as well. So any questions or anything that you guys have on this, please shoot me a shoot me a DM here on LinkedIn or shoot me an email tlayered at Expivia.net. And I'd love to help you but hey, have a great Black Friday have a great Cyber Monday and have an awesome holiday season as we're about to kick it off.

16:51Thank you very much.