As many of you know, the term “Black Friday” is commonly used to describe the Friday immediately after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday--the busy shopping day when many retailers begin to turn a profit for the year. Black Friday signals the start of the holiday shopping season, with its accompanying surge in the need for customer support. We can all think of examples of the latter: the frantic web searches to get our childrens’ gifts working properly, the calls to return a sweater that was the wrong size--sound familiar?

The holiday season is the acid-test of customer care in many industries. Businesses that fail the test will lose customers--often in droves--while those who delight their customers can surge ahead of the competition.

So how can businesses succeed--and excel--in providing world-class customer service even during this most challenging of seasons? The answer lies in properly leveraging the 3 Waves of Customer Care:  Cost, Relationship, and Experience. You can read about the details in this Read More »

Tags: Black Friday, collaboration, contact center, Customer Care, enterprise social software, mobile, video

Thanksgiving holiday came and went with Black Friday breaking records from last year. 

The highlights of the numbers that have been quoted in the press today are:

• Sales increased 6.6% over the same day last year, representing $11.4 billion in retail purchases and biggest amount ever spent during the day. 
• Retail foot-traffic increased by 5.1% over 2010  Source:  Shoppertrak

Looking beyond the headline numbers, here are  some other interesting data points:

• Black Friday has been stretched with pre-promotions and longer shopping hours.  Retail sales were up over 3.5% the week of November 12th and 18th
• Data from ShopperTrak indicated that consumers are visiting fewer stores per trip (being more efficient due to time crunch) with average of 3.1 stores down from 3.19 last year.  Shoppers are also doing more research on purchases before the trip.

Another report from ComScore shows  that Black Friday extended online before  Cyber Monday.

Bfads.net, number one most visited web site on Black Friday promotions
Source: ComScore

• $12.7 billion has been spent so far online to date this holiday season with $816 million in Online sales on Black Friday
• Thanksgiving Day online sales increased 18% to $479 million (perhaps after dinner  shopping instead of watching Thanskgiving football?)
• Top five online retail properties (excluding auction sites) are Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, Target and Apple with Amazon having 50% more visitors than any other retailer

What does this mean for retailers?  Here are some thoughts:

Read More »

Tags: Black Friday, Cisco, Cyber Monday, omnichannel, retail, retailing

Oh my, I hate crowds.

My daughter is 12 and thinks Black Friday is actually a holiday that follows Thanksgiving. The media has effectively gotten into her brain and she doesn’t even know why she wants to go shopping, but she knows she must. I keep telling her she doesn’t need a $50 VCR but she just doesn’t get it. I suppose I will take her and a friend to the mall and leave them there. There’s no way I am entering the abyss.

Then I will go home and do some real shopping.

My sister-in-law and I team up every year to work out who’s getting what for whom to make sure we get things people will like and to eliminate redundancies. Since I happen to be a big WebEx champion, we do it online.

We shop together using WebEx.

I know that makes me sound a little geeky, and maybe I am, but it’s so fun to surf the internet together and look at the same things at the same time. She had ideas, I have ideas. Sometimes we are sharing and often we are both finding things and then passing the ball back and forth to see each other’s discoveries.

While we shop, she can stop and talk to her toddler, we can both grab snacks and, maybe most importantly, we aren’t losing our minds in the crush of the crowd. It works well for us and I can imagine Read More »

Tags: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, family, free trial, shopping, together, WebEX