Each November, UK retailers experience a dramatic surge in online activity between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. High street stores still see increased footfall, but e-commerce now dominates the long weekend, with £1.12 billion spent online in the UK in 2024 alone. When the early wave of Black Friday traffic first hit the UK, many retailers struggled with the sudden surge, leading to several high-profile outages. Today, most retailers are far more experienced in managing demand, but the week still presents major challenges for Customer Experience (CX) teams.
Black Friday Blackouts
Although Black Friday originated in the US in the 1950s, it has become firmly embedded in the UK retail calendar. Early years were marked by chaotic scenes in physical stores, but the rise of e-commerce has shifted the battleground online. The event now signals the start of the British festive shopping season, and retailers across sectors tailor their strategies months in advance.
Household names including Tesco, Boots and John Lewis were among those to experience online disruption in the early boom years, with the media dubbing the phenomenon “Cyber Meltdown Friday”. While infrastructure and planning have since improved, the potential for disruption remains very real. A notable example came in 2016, when Gymshark’s website crashed under intense Black Friday demand, leading to an estimated £180,000 in lost sales.
Higher sales result in a surge of traffic into retailers’ contact centres across the week. Ensuring customer needs are met efficiently and effectively is key to attracting and retaining business. Customers reach out for several reasons at all stages of the purchasing process, for common issues such as returns or exchange queries, issues with paying or offer codes showing as invalid, as well as post-purchase issues such as customers chasing incomplete orders or looking to make changes to their delivery. And the stakes are high: According to PwC, 32% of customers will shop elewhere after just one bad experience.
To manage this crucial period effectively, UK retailers should focus on three key pillars:
1. Meeting Customers on Their Terms
Customers now have more channels than ever by which they can reach a brand. From traditional methods like phone to new and emerging digital and social options, customers can contact brands in a number of ways. Allowing them to reach out through their channel of choice is an important step to ensuring they enjoy a great experience. A multi-channel strategy can deliver customers a wealth of options, but omni-channel goes a step further, allowing for seamless channel shift and consistency, which could see a customer start an interaction on one channel and continue it on another, avoiding the need for customers to re-start their enquiry multiple times, which can be a source of frustration when moving between channels.
2. Ensuring Rapid Scalability During Peak Demand
One of the most common challenges associated with servicing an increased number of customers is the ability to scale. Retailers saw their websites crash due to an influx of visitors in the early years of Black Friday, and the contact centre can buckle under pressure if it isn’t able to seamlessly scale.
Contact centres that run on rigid, on-premises infrastructure struggle to ramp up and accommodate increased demand. Cloud technology has relieved the pressure caused by rapid scaling, ensuring peaks can be met and customers aren’t turned away. Sudden surges in traffic aren’t unique to retail, and these businesses can learn from other sectors that have proven an ability to scale usage without interruptions, such as utilities providers that must manage greatly increased volumes of interactions when the power cuts out. Simply being in the cloud isn’t a silver bullet to solving scalability challenges; retailers need to work with their CX provider to ensure their needs are understood and the correct protocols are in place.
3. Delivering Effective Self-Service
Not all customers need to come through the contact centre. For those seeking commonly requested information or wanting to make small changes to their order or account, self-service allows consumers to carry out tasks themselves. However, the correct infrastructure and information need to be in place to allow the public to operate on their own, otherwise, they will end up needing to contact an agent.
Updates that can be made through a portal, combined with in-depth FAQs, allow customers to operate autonomously, but the growing impact of AI will open different self-service methods, such as conversational and agentic AI. The information shared through AI agents will only be as strong as the data that sits behind it, so it is important to ensure that information is always up-to-date.
Winning on More Than Price
Black Friday may be synonymous with discounts, but UK shoppers do not expect a reduced quality of service alongside reduced prices. Whether dealing with a first-time buyer or a loyal returning customer, retailers should use this period as an opportunity to set a new benchmark for CX excellence. By mastering scalability, omni-channel engagement, and intelligent self-service, retailers can deliver smooth, stress-free experiences throughout the holiday rush and reinforce why customers should stay loyal long after the Black Friday sales have ended.
Martin Taylor is Co-Founder and Deputy CEO at Content Guru
Available in over 150 countries, storm® is the only cloud platform trusted to run national blue-light emergency services and its CX solutions have delivered the highest customer satisfaction scores in multiple industries for many of the globe’s largest organisations. Its brain® AI services provide leading automated and human-assist capabilities to bolster contact centre performance.
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