8 Easy BFCM Tricks to MASSIVELY Improve CX
If you do these 8 things, you are ahead of 99% of the brands I speak to
Hi team,
It’s mid-November. Black Friday is two weeks out. If you’re reading this thinking, “Oh, sh!t, we should probably get our CX together,” congratulations on being realistic about how this actually works.
Most BFCM prep timelines assume you started planning in August. Most of us are just finishing up our prep now, which is fine. But the more I talk to brands, the more I learn that it’s the small, seemingly insignificant things they miss, which turn into big messes.
Here are eight things you can knock out this week that will actually matter when the chaos hits. None of them needs a developer or a budget meeting.
Let’s jump in.
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1. CLEAN UP YOUR PROMO CODES BEFORE SOMEONE ROBS YOU
Sit down for two hours and pull every single active discount you’re running. Student discount through ID.me, Rakuten affiliate kickback, Shop App offers, influencer codes, that random 10% code your email team set up last month.
Now figure out what stacks and what doesn’t.
I’ve watched brands accidentally let customers combine a 15% id.me student discount, a 15% Rakuten cashback offer, and a full-site promo code because three different teams set them up without cross-referencing.
Customers aren’t dumb. They will find the loophole. And then you’re either eating a 40% discount you can’t afford or canceling orders and dealing with the fallout.
Map it all out. Fix the logic. Boring work, but it matters.
2. REWRITE YOUR MACROS SO THEY DON’T SOUND LIKE A ROBOT WROTE THEM
Open your five most-used canned responses. Read them out loud. If you cringe, rewrite them.
“We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience regarding your shipment inquiry,” sounds like nobody is home.
“Ugh, so sorry that your tracking hasn’t updated since last week. That seems super funky, and I know how annoying this can be. Let me look into that,” sounds like a human.
It takes an hour or two max. Your team will use these responses hundreds of times. Make them not suck.
3. UPDATE YOUR SHIPPING EMAILS SO YOU DON’T GET 300 “WHERE IS MY PACKAGE” TICKETS
Carriers are a disaster during the holidays. Packages get marked delivered when they’re sitting on a truck somewhere. You know this. Your customers don’t.
Go into your “order shipped” and “order delivered” email templates right now and add something like:
“Shipping is busy this time of year. If your tracking indicates ‘delivered’ but you don’t see it, check with your neighbors or the building management. Most packages show up within 24 hours. If yours doesn’t, reach out.”
One template update saves you from typing the same response 300 times in December.
4. PUT SHIP-BY DATES ON YOUR SITE
Add a banner today. “Order by December 18th for standard shipping to arrive by Christmas. December 20th for expedited.”
I promise you, half the angry emails you’ll receive the week before Christmas are from people who ordered on the 22nd and are shocked it hasn’t arrived yet.
Tell them now. Some will still ignore it, but at least you made an effort.
5. DECIDE WHO OWNS WHAT WHEN THINGS GO SIDEWAYS
Shipping delays, promo problems, product defects, returns. You already know what’s going to break. Assign one person to own each category.
Not “keep an eye on it.” Own it. They sit in fulfillment calls, they know what marketing is launching, and when CX needs help, they know exactly who to ping.
The problem during BFCM is never just volume. It’s that nobody knows whose job it is to fix anything, so nothing gets fixed until it’s already spiraling.
Write it down and share amongst the team.
6. OPEN YOUR SITE ON YOUR PHONE AND TRY TO BUY SOMETHING
Pull out your phone, go to your site, and try to check out.
Does it work? Can you tap the buttons without zooming? Does Apple Pay actually fire? Are the form fields broken? Can you x out the silly popup that takes over your entire site??
If you are like most, 80% of your traffic is mobile. If checkout is annoying on a phone, you’re losing sales and you’ll never know why because nobody tells you they gave up.
This takes ten minutes. Just do it.
7. ADD A BLACK FRIDAY SECTION TO YOUR FAQ
Open your FAQ page. Add a new section.
“When will my BFCM order ship?” “Can I stack promo codes?” “What’s your return policy on sale items?”
You’re going to get asked these 500 times. Answer them once, where people can find them. Then train your team to link to the page instead of retyping the same answer all day.
8. START WEEKLY SYNCS NOW, SWITCH TO DAILY ONCE YOU’RE CLOSE
Block 20 minutes every week starting Monday. CX, Ops, Marketing in a room or on a call. No slides, nothing too fancy, just focus on what needs to get done in the current sprint.
Then, once BFCM hits, switch to daily and focus on the top 5 things customers are saying, as well as what’s being done about them.
You’re not trying to micromanage. You’re trying to catch problems before they turn into disasters. If promo codes are breaking or the warehouse is backed up, you want to know at 10 AM, not 10 PM.
Do these 8 things. They won’t prevent every issue, but they’ll prevent enough to keep the weekend from turning into a total nightmare.
That’s it for this week!
Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?
Just shoot me a DM or an email!
P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.
