Prepare your customer support team for Black Friday sales

Come the end of the year every e-commerce business needs to pull out all the stops. The holiday season is the busiest time of the year, with one of the peaks on the 25th of November: Back Friday.

High sale prices are great, as is all the traffic that comes to the website and the store. Where marketing and sales teams create as much buzz as they possibly can, service and support teams from all over the world (Black Friday sales are not limited to the US anymore) need to get ready.

But your CS team is already stretched for time and effort. That’s why in this blog we’ll go over the essential automation needed to make your CS team sail through the busiest time of the year.

Automation that will pull your customer support teams through Black Friday sales

Rules

Rules are the foundation for streamlining workflows in busy periods. You can automate various tasks with rules, and thus help your CS team to work efficiently and waste no time.

Rules for instance can help in two ways:

1. By labeling conversations: is there a complaint? Rules are triggered by the contents of an email. So when the contents of an email contain certain words you can mark it as a high priority. Your team will immediately know it’s important, and they can act on it. Customers will appreciate the fast response.
2. Assign conversations to specific team members: is there a question about orders or one about invoices? No need to go through all messages individually. Assign them straight away to the right team by using automation. The right team and team member with the know-how on this specific topic can pick it up and respond fast.

Saving time and maintaining low response times during the Black Friday period is important. So is balancing the workload. So start off by labeling and assigning conversations. This way you’ll create a clear overview and everyone knows what’s expected without having to invest extra time and effort. With this heavy spike in customer engagement, you want your entire team to be productive and set up for success.

Auto-replies

With high traffic, perhaps even the highest of the year, in-store and online there will be questions flooding in. About opening hours of the store, about items on sale, about their orders, and so on.

Because it’s going to be extremely busy, response times can be higher than your normal average. That’s a shame because with this boost in customers you really want to make a great impression and serve and support all of them to the best of your teams' abilities. Luckily, there’s a feature called auto-replies.

There are 3 ways to set auto-replies:

1. During out-of-business hours
2. Always
3. At specific times

So whenever customers connect with you, outside of business hours or whenever your team is completely tied up, you can set auto-replies. Customers are not kept waiting and your response times will not be longer just because it’s the holiday season.

Use these auto-reply templates and get started right away.

Quick-replies

Definitely, not all questions can be met with an auto-reply as they only make sense for specific conversations. So whenever there is a message that you need a team member to look at before answering there are: quick-replies.

Answers to recurring questions can be templated and used in busy times. For instance, a question about the opening time of the store on the 25th of November? Let your team use quick replies so they don’t have to type the same answer each time.

This will save them a lot of time, the time they don’t have during busy periods and that they can spend on more complex questions.

Help and support 24/7 via chatbots

Black Friday sales only run on Friday but of course, a lot of customers are engaging with you during the entire holiday period. To offer 24/7 support add a chatbot to your website. This can also specifically be a WhatsApp chatbot.

The chatbot will recognize certain keywords and can answer pre-filled questions. Taking some of the pressure off of your customer support team. A lot of the time a chatbot can help customers find answers to their questions, without your team needing to put the effort in.

Keep the conversation going with flowbots

On to the flowbot! Where the chatbot recognizes keywords, the flowbot is a little bit more advanced. The bot really simulates conversations with prospects and customers, and it can gauge what the customer is looking for and offer them multiple-choice options.

Flowbot examples

A sales push

Are you looking for Black Friday sales deals on

Collection X

or

Collection Y?

Support flow

Do you have a question about your order?

Yes No

What is the topic of your question?

Delivery

Invoicing

I want to talk to the support team

You can make these flows as detailed as you like and can redirect customers to where they need to be. A help center article, FAQ, or a support member. And after you’ve assigned them to the right spot? You can follow up with an auto-reply letting the customers know you’ll get in touch. This entire flow you can create with rules.

More about automated rules

More about the flowbot

Make a CS success out of Black Friday

It’s the most wonderful time of the year but e-commerce businesses around the world are experiencing their busiest period. It’s really pivotal to make sure your customer support team is ready to take on the spike in customer communication. Because the last thing you want is to receive bad reviews because response times were high, there was bad communication about orders or CS team members were short-fused because of the high workload. In short: because service and support were lagging.

These automation features can really take the pressure off your customer support team and response times.

See these automation features in action try out WhatsApp Business in a 14-day free trial