Black Friday: Optimal sales phenomenon or collective retail suicide?

It’s time to put aside that leftover Halloween candy and pumpkin spice lattes to instead focus on the familiar ritual – worrying over whether this shopping season will deliver good tidings and cheery returns or show retail sales figures to be second-rate, coal filled stockings.

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday less than three weeks away, many retailers will be excused for feeling more frantic than festive when this retail revolution – accounting for as much as 30 percent of annual sales – hopefully makes up for what has been one of the toughest years for retail. As bargain-hunters wait in anticipation of discounts ready to be unleashed on the high street, British shoppers and retailers however are shunning the often-chaotic scenes witnessed across America during this event, by increasingly focussing their efforts online.

In fact, Britain is now the biggest online shopping nation in the developed world, with almost two thirds of adults using the internet to buy goods or services, according to IMRG, a body which represents the UK’s online retailers. The first half of 2018 alone, saw online retail accounting for more than 20% of retail sales, growing at ten times the rate of store sales.

**Trading trolleys for home delivery**

Black Friday Weekend 2017 didn’t disappoint when Brits showed their appreciation of the benefits of online shopping – not having to brave the weather, crowds or queues – by spending nearly £6.3 billion from the comfort of their own sofas.

It’s clear that the consumer is in control, enabled through technology to remain constantly connected and more empowered than ever before to drive changes in shopping behaviour in both the ‘bricks and mortar’ and online retail landscape. And while 2018 is turning out to be an eventful year in UK retail with headlines describing the sector to be in turmoil, is retail really in trouble, or is it transforming?

**What was once the ‘Golden Quarter’ has become a bargain hunter’s dream.**

More voices this year has been raised saying the Black Friday is collective suicide for the industry. In the past few years shoppers have seen no need to go shopping if they might get things cheaper the following week. In turn, to remain competitive and attract footfall, retailers promoted and prolonged the discount holiday shopping season driving down prices. By the time that Boxing Day dawned, there was so much discounting that shoppers showed ‘discount fatigue’ with results showing the main growth of sales had been online. In fact, a new report by GBH Insights shows Amazon dominating Black Friday sales in 2017 with the company claiming between 45% and 50% of all online Black Friday sales.

However, it’s certainly not all rosy for online retailers. According to a study by LCP Consulting the price retailers pay for online growth is significant. Black Friday is magnifying challenges across the retail sector such as consumers wanting to browse in-store, order online, have it delivered and picking up their order from a convenient collection point. They might return the item to the store, and when they do, pick up an alternative ordered via a mobile app. At each step they expect retailers to know who they are and what their recent interactions with the brand have been. Online sales figures might seem like a dream but LCP logistics consultancy reports that e-tailers are expected to be lumbered with £2.5bn worth of unwanted presents over the Christmas period, which could be a customer support nightmare.

**Christmas hangover for the high street?**

Despite sales in physical stores falling by 2.5%, the high street is far from dead, it is evolving. Not all consumers are ditching the trip to the shops. And emptier aisles don’t translate to less tension placed on the customer service department, customer contact channels or contact centre agents dealing with the busiest shopping weekend of the year. Some of the nation’s biggest shopping websites struggled to cope with the volume of online interactions, with John Lewis, Argos, Boots, Tesco and Game all crashing or suffering slow loading pages last year, so starting sales early this year should help prevent the same thing happening.

These retailers have proved the importance of adjusting your ‘brick and clicks’ strategy to allow consumers to browse, buy or self-serve using the most convenient channel for them, right up to the last-minute dash. They understand that customer experience can change the attitude of customers towards their favourite brands, so it’s of utmost importance to deliver the same levels of customer service during peak shopping season to that of quieter periods.

It’s unbelievable however, that some retailers are still caught off-guard, unprepared for the escalation of customer interactions during this busy period and last-minute shoppers still expecting exceptional service.

Many businesses will employ more staff in the lead up to Christmas as part of their customer service strategy. However, as many newbies will not have the same knowledge about products, refund or exchange procedures, like permanent staff, a clear multi-channel strategy is required to maintain high levels of customer experience. Deploying AI-powered online customer service software to ensure right, consistent answers are delivered to customers regardless of channel, and to assist temporary and permanent contact centre staff, could be the competitive advantage to provide the high levels of customer support needed.

**The future of the UK retail industry**

There is no way of knowing precisely how 2018 will play out for the UK’s retail sector as we face the uncertain consequences of the decision to leave the European Union.
However, the key takeaway for brands and retailers reading the consumer tea leaves this year is the need to embrace change. Physical retail is not dead. Boring retail is. Consumers are confident, and they are planning to spend. To exploit return, brands and retailers must be prepared to think differently and pro-actively support new consumer standards around when, where and how their key audiences plan to shop this holiday season.

**How will you transform your business with customers, competition and culture always changing?**

Christmas might just have come early.

Could we be in your 2019 budget? Why not [**trial our digital customer engagement tools free for up to 60 days?**](https://synthetix.com/do-you-qualify)

**Further reading:**

The gift that keeps on giving, the page turner that is ‘Multi-Channel Online Customer Service For Dummies’

* Understand the challenges delivering effective online service creates
* Get an overview of the tools available to meet those challenges
* Discover the must-haves you need for effective implementation

Using AI-powered solutions can optimise engagement with early-stage buyers

Let’s not beat around the bush: the traditional sales funnel model is no longer relevant.

B2B businesses have their work cut out as the AIDA model to guide a single prospect to purchase just doesn’t work anymore. Instead B2B marketers have to connect and convince entire teams involved throughout the buying cycle.

Forrester’s Steven Casey shared some very powerful insights in his recent report about how AI-powered solutions can optimise engagement with early-stage buyers and in particular how properly oriented bots and VAs can help B2B marketers remove friction from the earliest stages of the buying process, automate administrative tasks, and enable sellers to be more consultative.

Synthetix are delighted to have been included in this research and could not agree more with the insights. Synthetix CEO, Peter McKean’s thoughts is iterated in Forrester’s conclusions.

Interest in chatbots for customer service, or “Virtual Agents” is growing exponentially as AI-powered automation gains user acceptance thanks to bot technologies like Siri and Alexa normalising conversational interaction. The current generation of Virtual Agents are able to unlock functionality that previous bots could not, now that cloud-based SaaS CRM and marketing platforms have become widely adopted. Cloud services tend to feature comprehensive API interfaces, which enable bots to personalise the dialogue with their customers and to solve account-related issues. This means that modern bot platforms finally have the technological potential to meet customer expectations – something that bots of the past rarely did.
But Virtual Agents are as much about methodology and psychology as they are about technology. When we reduce them down to their technological barebones, you’re left with merely an IVR and this is where so many new bot deployments go wrong, even in 2018. The proliferation of simple, commoditised bot platforms has delivered powerful tools into the hands of developers, but this is analogous to the early days of Desktop Publishing, where software packages such as PageMaker and even Microsoft Publisher were made available to almost anyone, resulting in a slew of terrible amateur publications with terrible typography and horrible clip art in the wrong aspect ratio!

That’s where we are with bots – poor design, bad dialogue and confusing interfaces.

Synthetix offers many digital engagement tools with off-the-shelf configuration, but not chatbots. Those, we build to order, taking the time to capture the primary business objectives and goals for the technology and leveraging the skills of the most experienced chatbots designers in the world – Synthetix has been building chatbot Virtual Agents for customer service since 2001. We’ve developed a framework for chatbot development that enables customers to think about it less like software configuration and more like on-boarding a new employee. We guide customers through making the right choices to ensure that their bot deployment is successful from day-one and only gets better over time.

The small step towards AI that can deliver quick-win business results

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Waiting staff ‘lovin’ their new AI-powered chatbot.

Chatbot offers step by step guidance

One of the UK’s largest, most profitable, and globally recognised employers in the fast food industry has invested in a new and innovative way to assist their staff anytime they need it. A new intelligent Virtual Agent assists staff to troubleshoot should they experience technical difficulties with items such as a drinks dispenser or order taking equipment.

The intelligent Virtual Agent/chatbot designed by Synthetix, offers step by step guidance displaying technical manuals, to get simple issues fixed as soon as possible, without having to call and wait for an engineer. If the system detects that a problem requires expert intervention, the bot automatically logs and schedules a call for further assistance through an integrated call-back system.

Neil Spalding, Head of Channel Sales at Synthetix says, “It’s a great honour to work alongside such a global brand who are embracing technology to not only assist their staff but help serve their customers better. The Virtual Agent’s integration with the call-back system is extremely efficient to get operational levels back to optimum capacity.”

Automotive giant, Toyota switches their customer experience to top gear

The world’s fifth-largest company joins the prestige Synthetix client list

Synthetix are proud to add Toyota, the Japanese multinational automotive manufacturer, well-known for its management philosophy and the world’s first mass-market hybrids, the fifth-largest company in the world by revenue, to our prestige client list.

Toyota chose Synthetix to assist in enhancing their online customer experience by deploying integrated FAQ Search across their brand websites to enable customers to find instant, accurate answers to their questions 24/7 using natural language search. Synthetix also deployed an Agent Knowledge-base within their contact centre to assist contact centre agents with the means to answer customer queries quickly, consistently and accurately.

Toyota’s motto is to apply their know-how in ways that benefit people, the community and the planet, embracing innovation that can deliver on this promise. Which is why they also invested in Visual IVR, one of the most successful and compelling web self-services tools currently available, proven to greatly enhance customers experience and encourage self-service.

Neil Spalding, Head of Channel Sales at Synthetix says, “We feel really privileged to work alongside such an innovative conglomerate who are embracing technology to assist their staff and to meet the needs of their customers’ expectations. We look forward to working closely with Toyota to enhance the ongoing dialogue they have with their customers.”