Episode 013: Preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday Part 2   Episode Summary:  In this second episode of a two-part series, Julie dives into how to get your customer service team, inventory management, and shipping systems ready to tackle Black Friday and Cyber Monday.   Episode Links: https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod    Episode Transcript:   Announcer: Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Business Method, with your host, Julie Feickert.   Julie Feickert: Hello, and welcome to episode 13 of The Savvy Business Method podcast, where we talk about how to plan, start, and grow your small business online, especially during the holiday season. I am Julie Feickert and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family.   Are you starting to shift into holiday mode? You know, it's that time of year, and as ecommerce website owners and ecommerce marketers it feels like we have to make this holiday shift so early in the year. But it's really important. We want to take advantage of the revenue available during the holiday season. So if you haven't had a chance yet, be sure to go back and listen to the previous episode that came in your feed on Thursday, November 1st. And that's where I went over in great detail how you need to set up your marketing systems to be ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And if you set your marketing up properly, hopefully you are going to be seeing a lot more traffic to your website, a lot more orders placed, more people contacting customer service. The whole thing just becomes bigger and potentially harder to manage.   And so today, I want to continue the Black Friday and Cyber Monday discussion, but I want to cover a series of topics I don't think I've ever seen anyone else talk about. You know, everyone is so focused on marketing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and marketing is really important. And also, of course, it's honestly like really interesting and even a little sexy, but I have been running ecommerce websites for 10 years, and during that time I have at some point done every single job myself. I've answered customer services emails. I've ordered inventory. I've packed orders. And even once I got to the point where I had an amazing team, on a big sales weekend like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you better believe I was out there with them working alongside them.   So in all those years with all those holiday seasons under my belt, let me tell you, marketing is only part of your responsibilities as a business owner. And there are some really important things you need to get in place in terms of your customer service, your inventory, your shipping systems, to make handling what is hopefully going to be a huge influx of orders a more positive experience for you and your team.   All right, so today's topic is about getting the rest of your business ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Now, this long weekend we have coming up, it's such a crucial opportunity to bring in substantial revenue and hopefully gain a lot of new customers you can continue to market to the rest of the year. So the last thing you need is to be getting behind on answering customer's questions, or taking a week or longer to ship out their orders because you know if you take too long to ship out their orders, they're going to call customer service, right? And those interactions are going to cost you money and customers will perceive this as a negative experience. So you really have to not only be on your marketing game during the season, you have to kind of be on your management operations game as well. And so that is what we're going to focus on. What tweaks or changes can you put in place now so that you can be in the best possible position?   All right, well let's start with customer service. Now, whether it's just you doing your customer service, or you have a team, you need to be ready to handle more customer service inquiries. And like I just said, you can't afford to get behind, right? This is the time when you need to stay on top and be getting back to people quickly. All right, so let's talk about your staffing. Now, I will tell you from experience that realistically you probably don't need to increase your staffing. You don't need to go out and hire anybody. You don't need to necessarily bring in temps. I've had good luck over the years with just encouraging everyone to be a little bit more on their game or work a little bit faster than normal. You know, you can't do that to your staff every day of the year, of course, but if you can create the positive environment, the energy, and maybe even some reward systems in place, you can probably get everybody to be a little bit more energized and working a little bit harder and faster than they normally would. They'll be able to do that for a couple of days, right? You've got good people, they'll help you out here.   Now, as a practical matter, there are some things though that you can do with your staffing to make this a little bit easier. Now, one is making sure you have staffing the day after Thanksgiving. A lot of companies like to give people that day after Thanksgiving off, and who doesn't love a four-day weekend, of course? But I have generally found that I at least want to have some staff around the day after Thanksgiving. So on a Friday, typically, with one of my companies, we'd have two or three people working. On the day after Thanksgiving, one person would generally be able to handle it.   And that sounds strange, right? But the thing that we found was that most people shopping online didn't start shopping online till later in the day anyway. They were out standing in line for the sock sale or something first, or to get that big screen TV, and then they ended up shopping online later in the afternoon. But in the end, just make sure you have some coverage on Friday to keep those inboxes cleaned out and to keep them caught up.   Now, the same general idea applies to the weekend. I find that it's generally best to make sure that there is someone, at the very least, logging in every few hours to clean out the inbox. If you can staff your customer service department all weekend so that you can do chat and phone calls and email real time, that's awesome, but if that's not something you can do, see if you can get a volunteer to work some overtime and to clean out that box every few hours so your staff aren't facing a huge onslaught when they come in on Monday. Now, the other reason you want to stay on top of your customer service inquiries over this really important weekend is because if there are problems with your website, or if your coupon codes, your promotion isn't working properly, having staff who see those emails or chats quickly can make a huge difference in how quickly you can get that problem fixed.   All right, next up, when you're thinking about customer service for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you want to give some thought to the promotions that you're running. Now, we talked about promotions on Thursday in the last episode, but in this case, you're going to want to really sit down and think about what is everything that could possibly go wrong with the promotion. Sounds so negative, right? You want to be sure though that your promo or your coupon is working perfectly. This is not a time to be confusing customers. It needs to have a clear spot it goes in the cart in checkout. People need to easily be able to see that the discount that they're expecting is being applied properly.   Now, if it turns out that something does go wrong, and your staff are getting complaints from customers, you want to be sure that there is a system in place so that they can resolve those issues. So this could be making sure, of course, that you're easy to get ahold of, as a business owner. It could also be making sure someone in your customer service department knows how to work your promo system on the backend and can fix any glitches. It also may be that, you should always, of course, have your developer's phone number on hand or a quick way to get ahold of them in case you have a major website issue.   Something else that I have found personally that really works well for reducing the number of customer service inquiries that come in over that Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend, is to make whatever promo that I'm running on my websites automatic, so that people don't need to add a coupon code, okay? And there's a couple of reasons for this, but the main one is that people will inevitably forget to add the coupon code and then they'll be calling you a couple days later asking you to add it retroactively. And every ecommerce system I know of does not make that easy, and so it's a very manual process. You end up having to do a manual refund. It's a mess, but it's also difficult to turn people down, right? Because then you're creating customer service issues.   So all I'm saying is that if you are letting everybody have the discount automatically, you can save yourself a lot of headaches later. If you decide though you want to use coupon codes and you want to make your customers apply those, be sure you have some scripts, some practicing going on with your customer service staff, some processes in place to handle those inquiries when people forget to apply those coupon codes.   All right, now as we discussed on Thursday, I generally recommend that you make whatever promotion you're running for your Black Friday sale a little bit better or a little wider than what you run for your Monday sale. This will help prevent complaints of customers who bought on Friday and now feel that they would have gotten a better deal if they waited till Monday. So that's just a small thing you can do in the way you set up your promotions and the order you do them in to help reduce those customer service complaints.   Also, make your coupon codes, if you're going to use coupon codes, work for a day or two longer than you advertised them. So let's say that your Cyber Monday coupon code expires the Wednesday after Cyber Monday. I would suggest from the backend of your system that that code actually expire on Friday, because I assure you, people are going to be going through their email later in the week, they're going to find it, they're going to try to take advantage of it, and it's not going to work, and they're going to get upset, and then they're going to call you. And again, those interactions cost you money. It is far better for you to get that sale even at the discount than it is for you to have to pay someone to talk to that person, and then inevitably probably give them some form of compensation or the discount anyway. So just save yourself some time, money, and headaches.   All right, last up in terms of keeping customer service a doable situation for that weekend, be sure you're not making any major changes to your website right before Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Trust me, and it's Murphy's Law, right? Something will go wrong. Also, you'll want to double-check that your website can handle extra traffic. If you are using a hosted ecommerce solution, something like Shopify or BigCommerce or CoreCommerce, you probably don't have really any say in where your site is hosted, it's being done by the company for you, but if you are on a platform, something like, we were on Magento for nine years, we had to host our own server, so we had to contract for a server.   So if you're in that situation, double-check with your developer that there's been some testing done, that you're going to be able to handle increased traffic so your site doesn't crash, because that is truly the last thing you need, right? Also, as I mentioned before, make sure you know how to reach your developers is there is an emergency, and that they are going to be around the holiday weekend to be able to help you. So that'll help keep, you know, if your customer service people are getting complaints about the website, just having those things in place allows you to fix problems more quickly.   All right, next up, let's talk about inventory. So inventory, there's just a couple quick tips here over the years that I've learned. One, is make sure you're ordering far enough in advance to allow for problems. It's really easy as small business owners, especially for cash flow, that we'll wait until the last moment to order our inventory because we don't want to spend the money, right? But keep in mind that everyone is bringing in new inventory right now, not just you, and so often it can take a supplier longer to ship your inventory. Freight systems might be backed up a little bit. So allow yourselves at least a couple extra days, preferably an extra week or two, just in case something goes wrong with your shipment. It would be such a shame to not be able to reap the rewards of this holiday weekend because your inventory didn't come in on time. Now, I truly understand that balancing having enough inventory, but not too much because you didn't want to tie up your cash is really hard. I would just encourage you to think about how people shop on your website normally, and then you're just going to have to make some guesses in terms of how much extra you're going to sell. Now, keep in mind, depending on what your promotion is, if you're offering free gifts as part of your promotion, all of that has to be taken into account in advance with your inventory numbers so that you have enough on hand.   And if this is your first year or two of doing Black Friday and Cyber Monday, please rest assured that this does get easier. Years three, four, five, six, and beyond, you'll feel like a pro at this. Yeah, I mean, there's always a little bit of uncertainty. You're never sure until you get to that weekend, how things are going to go, but at least you'll have some data to work with. So do your best, hang tight, it gets easier from here. All right, so if you have done your marketing well, you have met your customers' needs, you have product in stock to sell, with any luck you are going to have a lot of orders coming in, right? That is the goal.   And so let's talk about getting those orders out the door. Now, this is something you really have to give a lot of thought to if you are shipping your own orders. If you're outsourcing that to a third party, congratulations, your life, your weekend's going to be much easier than the rest of us. But for those of us who do our own shipping, let's stop and talk about what this looks like. Now, I would recommend that you sit down the next couple of days and give some thought to what scaling looks like. So let's say you get twice as many orders over Black Friday and Cyber Monday as you normally would over a weekend, okay? What does that look like? That's probably not too big a deal, right? Your system can probably adjust for that. What if you get five times as many orders? Okay, now it gets more complicated, right? You have to start thinking about people and processes a little bit more.   I would really encourage you, you know, obviously you don't want to get your hopes up that you're going to have the greatest weekend ever, hopefully you will, but still, but I would also encourage you not to assume that this is just going to work itself out. Save that attitude for the day that you're on some big cable news show with no notice and you just have to do the best you can to get your orders out. This one you see coming, right? You know this holiday weekend's coming, so take a little bit of time, give it some thought, and start planning out how you can scale your resources.   All right, so specifically let's talk about staffing. A couple of things that have worked really well for me over the years is one, making sure that we go into Friday completely caught up on shipping, okay? Friday morning when your staff come to work, if you have a team, they need to be shipping whatever up to the minute has come in for orders. You want to stay caught up at all times so that when that influx really starts, you're in a good position to keep up with it to the best that you can. I would also suggest talking to your team in advance and double-checking if they would be available to work the weekend, if they could work longer hours during the following week, how much you're going to be able to mess around with their hours when they come in and leave, so that you can flex your current team and get the most productivity out of them.   Unless you're a very large company, I would really avoid hiring anyone new or temps unless you have absolutely no other options, okay? This is not a good time to be bringing people in. If you do have to hire temps, you need to bring them in probably at least a week in advance to get them trained. You're probably going to have to put some extra quality systems in place. An alternative to hiring temps, something that I've used successfully for years, is we had this rule, company-wide, it wasn't just Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but company-wide all year, if there was a large number of orders that needed to be shipped, everyone in the company, including myself, was responsible for being out there and shipping orders, okay?   And not only did that mean that we didn't have to bring in temps for a big weekends, it also really developed a camaraderie and a company culture that I was really proud of, that we all pitched in and worked together. And when I say all, obviously not the customer service staff because they're busy, but if you have anyone working in marketing or accounting or office management, or I have some friends who, their college-age kids would come home every year, and they knew that the entire break, they were going to be working at the warehouse. So use your resources that you know and try to flex those resources first.   All right, so what I'm talking about here is going to be pretty taxing to your team if you have one, or to your family if you don't a team and you're just using your family, be sure to plan in some rewards here. Be kind to these people. Buy them lunch, call out staff who are people who go above and beyond. One year, we handed out movie tickets that I bought at Costco. And that was a huge, people loved that. It wasn't a very expensive gift, but it really meant a lot to people that we had thought in advance about how we could reward them for working hard and putting in that extra effort. So just be thinking about some of those things that you can do.   All right, next up, let's talk about your shipping equipment. You really need to be realistic about how many orders you can process in an hour, even if you managed to find more people to help you. So let me give you an example. For years we had one shipping computer. So we had one computer that was attached to a scale with the label printer that could do the official shipment of the order. And that worked fine, what, 360 days a year? That was fine. But Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we really had to start thinking about okay, that one shipping computer, with the best person in the warehouse to run it, can only ship, I think we could ship 45 to 50 orders an hour. Okay, there's a lag time to getting that label printed. And so then you have to start thinking okay, well, instead of running my computer for three or four hours a day, what happens if I have to run this computer for 10 hours a day, what does that look like?   And so this is where maybe you might flex your staff, for example, or run shifts. Another option is if you happen to be paranoid like I am about your hard drive on your shipping computer blowing up on a random Tuesday, you might have an extra computer that you keep around. This would be a good time to get it hooked up and have it ready to go so that that shipping computer doesn't become a bottleneck.   Now, you also got to keep in mind that it's not just you, right, shipping a lot of order these days. All the other companies in your area and in the country are going to be doing the same thing. So I would recommend making sure that you have cell phone numbers for your shipping reps handy. So if you ship with the Post Office, you should have the cell phone number for your account rep handy. Same thing with UPS and FedEx. Now, on one hand it is your responsibility, absolutely, in advance to make sure that you know how to get an extra pickup schedule, that you have more totes if you're using like those big Post Office totes or something, that you have all of that ready to go.   But if something urgent comes up, you need to be able to get a hold of your rep quickly. So for example, we had years where our driver forgot to pick up our shipments at the end of the day, and it was just he had a full truck. He had been stuffing his truck all day long and he forgot about us. It was just a mistake, but being able to get a hold of your rep and get someone else out to come pick things up is really handy because otherwise you're stuffing it all in your car and driving to the Post Office multiple times or to UPS, and that is no fun.   All right, also in terms of getting your orders shipped, I would encourage you just to take a look at the systems you have in place. Being busier generally means that more mistakes are going to get made, even though your staff are going to be doing their best, they're going to be trying hard, this might be a good time to think about putting in some simply quality checking, if that's not something you already have going on, with a caveat though, okay. Do not make major changes to your process.   Just like I talked about with the customer service, this isn't the time to make major changes to your website, this is also not the time to do like a major upgrade to your shipping system or your inventory system, or change around how you process an order. You want to keep your core systems in place and stable, but maybe you have a double-checking system or something you put in place just for this weekend so that as you're busier, you're making sure you're not ending up with a bunch of orders that are going out incorrectly, okay? All right, so customer service, inventory, getting orders out. All these things need to be coordinated so that you can have a smooth weekend, and frankly, the following week when you're getting all these orders out.   All right, last step. I would really recommend that you do a debrief. Once you've gotten all of the orders out the door, sit down either yourself, or with your family, or with your team, or whoever it is made it through this important time of year with you, you need to sit down and have a very honest discussion about what went right and what went wrong. So buy everybody lunch and get out your notepad and start writing things down. And this is not the time for blame. This is all about learning and improving because busy times are great for finding holes in your larger system.   So I would recommend you divide the list that you make into two parts. One of them is going to be things that went right or improvements that you need to make, that you could make now to benefit your company on a daily basis. So for example, during this process you may have found a more efficient way to ship your orders. Or maybe your customer service people found a better way to handle a customer's issue, or maybe you found a more effective way to market a promotion. All of that could potentially be incorporated into your daily operations and benefit you with this coming year.   Your second list should be improvements that need to be made or things that you did really well that are specific to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And so you want to write those down, get 'em typed up, put 'em in a safe place, and then either put a reminder on your calendar to go check that file, or I have been known to put the entire text of that meeting in an email attached to a calendar reminder in my Outlook for about September 15th of the next year so that you remember to go back and take a look and remember what it was you did right, and what you need to work on this next year.   All right, that was a lot, wasn't it? But here's the thing, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are important, we need to make as much money as possible, and so it really does benefit us to be as prepared as possible. But the good news is that's it for today. I am hopeful though that this has given you some things to work on so that this holiday weekend can go as smoothly as possible for you.   And I'll be back on your feed on Thursday with a new episode. We are going to talk about tackling a very annoying problem, and that is the high rate of abandoned shopping carts that many of us have on our websites. So if this is something that you find frustrating, be sure to tune in, I've got some ideas for you. To get ready for that episode, if you get a minute, get into your ecommerce platform and take a look at how many abandoned shopping carts you have. So how many shopping carts are created and how many people actually place orders, and have that number ready to go. So when you're listening on Thursday, you can get some idea as for how you need to proceed to improve that situation.   All right, in the mean time, I would love to hear from you. If you have feedback or ideas for future shows, you can find me at savvybusinessmethod.com, as well as on Facebook and YouTube. And please be sure to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast so it can help other people find it as well. And I will see you next time.   Announcer: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe. And for more great content and to stay up-to-date, visit savvybusinessmethod.com and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.     Episode 013: Preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday Part 2