Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are high-stakes events for retailers that present a huge opportunity to drive revenue. Beyond the excitement of attracting shoppers and boosting sales, merchants also have to focus on retaining customers and ensuring long-term loyalty. 

The holiday rush, paired with inevitable issues like stockouts and shipping delays, can create negative experiences that might drive customers away. The good news is: these challenges are opportunities to delight your customers by building trust and fostering repeat business. 

The key to achieving success during BFCM isn’t just how much you sell, but how you treat your customers. A defensive strategy that anticipates problems and focuses on stellar customer service can not only keep customers happy but also reduce operational headaches and revenue losses. 

Keep reading to learn more about why you need a defensive strategy for BFCM prep and how to build one that will help you retain customers, reduce ticket times, and generate future sales.

Why a Defensive BFCM Prep Strategy is Crucial for Merchants

Retailers often think of BFCM as a revenue sprint, which is why they focus on discounts, promotions, and driving traffic. However, a critical aspect of sustaining BFCM growth is how you handle challenges during this busy period. 

The deluge of orders, website traffic, and inquiries you receive during BFCM is truly a stress test for your customer service team. Issues like shipping delays, returns, and stockouts can both upset your customers and hurt your reputation.

To truly thrive during this high-pressure season, you need to take a defensive approach by anticipating problems before they happen and turning them into opportunities for building customer loyalty.

After all, how you respond to customer service issues during BFCM can make or break customer retention for the months and years to come.

How to Build a Defensive BFCM Prep Strategy in 3 Steps

Retailers, follow these three steps to create a defensive strategy for BFCM that will leave every customer with a great impression of your brand – even when things go wrong.

Provide Store Credit for Shipping Delays

Overwhelming demand makes shipping delays an all-too-common headache during BFCM. While shipping issues are frustrating for customers, they don’t have to make you lose their future business. In fact, shipping delays offer an opportunity to strengthen your relationship with customers and keep them coming back for more.

One effective way to handle shipping delays is to offer store credit compensation. By giving customers store credit when their order is delayed, you’re not only acknowledging the inconvenience, but you’re also giving them an incentive to come back and make another purchase. 

Research from Rise.ai shows that customers compensated with store credit for shipping delays tend to come back, and when they do, they often spend more – up to five times the value of the credit issued.

Offering store credit instead of cash refunds keeps the revenue within your business while creating goodwill with customers. Remove the friction from this process by automating it with Rise.ai. This solution ensures customers receive their credit immediately, freeing your customer service team up to focus on more complicated tickets. 

Offer Gift Cards for Out-of-Stock Items

Stockouts are an unfortunate reality of the BFCM season, with items quickly selling out due to high demand. However, stockouts don’t have to mean the end of the customer journey. When an item is sold out, you can redirect customers who were ready to make a purchase to buy a gift card instead. This strategy lets them capture the value they intended to spend with your brand, without going to a competitor.

Moreover, when the recipient goes to redeem the gift card, chances are they’ll spend more than the gift card’s value. According to Capital One, nearly two in three gift card redeemers spend more than the card’s value: $31.75 more on average. In other words, gift cards ultimately generate more revenue for your business than in-stock products.

Rise.ai makes it incredibly easy for merchants to sell gift cards as placeholders for out-of-stock items. Simply enable this feature on your Shopify store, and a “Send a Gift Card Instead” button will automatically appear on product pages when an item is out of stock. By clicking this button, customers will be sent to your gift card page, ensuring that their intent to spend doesn’t go unfulfilled.

Streamline Refunds & Returns with Store Credit

With two in five shoppers returning online purchases at least once per month outside of the holiday season, returns are even more common during BFCM, when gift purchases and size issues are common. While refunds can be expensive for retailers, costing between $25 and $30 per return due to shipping, customer service, and restocking costs, they don’t have to result in total revenue loss.

When you offer store credit instead of cash refunds, you can keep the money within your business and generate upsells with store credit. By issuing store credit for returns via Rise.ai, soap brand Dr. Squatch saw a 30% redemption rate that generated $197,000 in sales – $111,000 of which was upsell revenue.

Rise.ai integrates with leading return management apps like Loop, Narvar, and AfterShip, allowing you to offer a bonus on return value when customers opt for store credit. By incentivizing store credit over cash refunds, you not only reduce the financial impact of returns but also encourage additional spending.

Wrapping Up: Build Loyalty Beyond BFCM

A defensive BFCM strategy is about more than just minimizing damage: it’s about creating opportunities to turn potential losses into gains. By anticipating common challenges like shipping delays, stockouts, and returns, and using tools like Rise.ai’s store credit and gift cards, you can transform negative situations into positive customer experiences.

Remember, how you handle problems during BFCM can have a lasting impact on customer loyalty. Focus on delighting your customers, even when things go wrong, and they’ll reward you with their trust – and their future business. Learn more about Rise.ai. Request a demo today.