Are you ready to win with Black Friday?

If you’re a retailer or e-commerce business, you’ll know the highs – and lows – that Black Friday can bring. Get the season right and you can win brand loyalty for life. Get it wrong and you can lose a valued customer forever. And what about your workforce? An effective Black Friday strategy will make the difference between stressed-out agents and a team that feels equipped and inspired to go the extra mile.

So, what will 2025’s Black Friday season bring? And how can your business get the best from peak volume demand?

Black Friday has established itself as an essential part of the retail calendar. It’s celebrated as the year’s most critical revenue-generating window. According to WooCommerce data, over 70% of US merchants make at least 20% of their revenues during Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. But it’s also an important opportunity to wow customers and tell new stories about your brand.

That’s why peak season planning isn’t an operational necessity, it’s a strategic imperative. Will your customer service operations be sufficiently prepared to meet high-volume demand? No business wants unhappy customers, burnt-out staff, missed sales, high costs, high churn, and resulting damage to reputation. The good news is that there are more ways than ever to accurately forecast, prepare for and efficiently meet even the highest levels of demand. A structured, data-driven and technology-enabled strategy is best – from early planning, through ramp-up and onto execution. 

Based on our experience working with retail and e-commerce leaders, here are five critical success factors to ensure your company hits the mark with Black Friday and other peak sales opportunities. It’s about early planning, having a great partner by your side to share the challenge, taking care of your agents, optimizing your operations, and matching great value with great experience for your customers.

In our experience supporting leading global brands – and evidenced by industry best practices and operational benchmarks – the month of May is a critical window to start planning. Kicking off in May will give you enough time to align strategically, integrate effectively, and be fully operational before peak planning cycles begin. Delaying beyond this point can significantly compress timelines and limit flexibility, making it harder to execute successfully later in the year.

In essence, early planning brings three key advantages. 

• Firstly, it means that you can conduct comprehensive due diligence to select the best external partner for your needs. 
• Secondly, you have the space to align onboarding and training phases more closely with forecasted demand curves. 
• Thirdly, you can avoid reactive (and potentially costly) hiring and resource constraints during Q3 and Q4. By initiating preparations during this window, you’ll have sufficient runway to establish performance frameworks, integrate systems and calibrate quality assurance protocols.

Having a trusted business process outsourcing or customer service partner by your side will make all the difference in the world. Choosing the best partner for your business means looking beyond headcount numbers and cost-per-contact metrics. Take time to consider all the relevant evaluation criteria – including:

• Domain expertise. Has the potential partner got a strong track record in supporting retail or e-commerce brands during high-demand periods? Do they share your values? Do they have a proven strategy to share? Will they deploy skilled agents, and can they align their processes with your specific needs?
• Complementary peak calendars. Do they serve customers with a range of differing peak seasons (such as tax or travel seasons)?
• Flexibility. Can they dynamically adjust resource allocations in response to shifting demand patterns?
• Technological maturity. Do they deploy game-changing digital enablers, such as AI-based training, call-flow simulations, and self-service optimization tools to improve outcomes for your business?
• Labor market suitability. Do they have expertise in regional labor norms, work-week regulations, and agent availability in your relevant geographies?

While you might know when your agents are ready, based on our experience, a key metric is Time-to-Proficiency – the measure of how long it takes for an agent to perform at optimal levels. In fact, failure to manage this metric effectively can result in lower first contact resolution rates, higher average handling times and lower Net Promoter Scores.

A strategy to shorten your Time-to-Proficiency (TTP) should take a robust and data-driven approach to readiness planning, aligning agent ramp-up schedules with projected volume spikes. Can you plan for phased hiring from July through September to stagger onboarding and achieve full proficiency by October? If you can, this will stabilize performance in time for the season to start.

From working with customers, we know that TTP metrics are directly influenced by the structure and duration of training programs. Broadly speaking, a training program of approximately three weeks typically correlates with a three-week TTP period. The latest AI tools such as Copilot offer major benefits in helping agents to achieve proficiency faster, for instance by simulating real call scenarios. In fact, according to recent research, retailers who integrated AI chatbots into their operations experienced a 9% increase in sales conversions.

Optimizing workforce costs is critical to protecting the bottom line. On one hand, premature overstaffing will inflate fixed costs without delivering corresponding value for your customers or your business. On the other, late-stage onboarding erodes performance and customer satisfaction.

It’s important to find ways of optimizing your workforce and costs without compromising the experience of your people or your customers. A balanced data-enabled approach to workforce management will ensure people are not overstretched while maintaining cost-efficiency and performance.

Staggered scheduling is one way to significantly improve productivity. With advances in AI and analytics, companies can take a data-driven approach to align staff hours with accurate week-over-week forecasted contact volumes (based on historical data). Today’s more advanced Workforce Management digital platforms offer new ways to monitor occupancy and prevent overstaffing.

Once peak season has kicked off, meticulous attention is needed on how people and processes are orchestrated. Again, digital enablers are key to maximizing efficiency while looking after your people and protecting your brand. In the new age of agentic AI, these include use of AI-powered automation to execute repetitive tasks, for instance, implementing bots and self-service for FAQs, order tracking, and basic troubleshooting. This frees-up agents to focus on looking after your customers, using their ingenuity, and taking care of sensitive or complex needs.

From a workforce management perspective, consider de-prioritizing non-time-sensitive tasks and back-office processes, and assign your most experienced people for high-value or sensitive interactions and. What’s more, introducing new work shifts as needed will help to maintain full capacity during the critical weeks, with agents asked to schedule their vacations outside of high-pressure sales periods.

Peak season preparedness is not a downstream task: it is a strategic pillar of revenue assurance and reputation management. By initiating planning early, selecting the right partners, deploying digital tools, and leveraging geographic labor advantages, you can evolve ever more resilient, responsive and high-performing customer service operations. 

Black Friday offers virtually unlimited opportunities for forward-looking business. Yet while the rewards are great, so too are the risks if Black Friday isn’t carefully orchestrated. Now is the time to act. This is an unmissable opportunity to get clearer about your markets, create special memories for customers, excite your team, and achieve new levels of success together.