You can’t control your courier, or your payment gateway or a lot of essential elements in your delivery process.
Warren Hawkins, MD of Euphoria Telecom
Your customers don’t care whose fault it is – they just want to know what’s going on and that you are on it. The best way to do that is through the telephone – good old voice communication.
And yet, this is precisely where the Black Friday stress test often finds a significant, early failure.
Businesses spend much time and effort engineering the perfect Black Friday sales spike. They stress-test servers, optimise ad spend, and build complex marketing funnels to capture demand.
But they can create a common, yet critical, blind spot: they forget to stress-test their most important human-facing channel.
They forget the phone.
When ‘support’ is actually ‘sales’
A common mistake is assuming the phone is just a customer support channel for complaints. On Black Friday, your phone system is a critical sales channel.
When a high-value customer is on your website and their voucher code fails, or they need to confirm stock before placing a R20 000 order, they don’t send a speculative email. They call. When a payment gateway times out and a customer panics, wondering if their money is gone or if their order is confirmed, they call.
These are not support calls; they are high-intent, high-value interactions at the very point of purchase. If that call goes to an endless ring tone, a busy signal, or a voice menu that loops back on itself, you have not created a support issue. You have lost a sale.
The customer experience of a failed call
While businesses focus on website uptime, their customers are experiencing a different kind of crash. The customer journey in a poorly planned system often looks like this:
- The Black Hole: The customer calls and is met with an automated message: “All our agents are busy, please try again later,” followed by a click. The call is dropped.
- The Endless Wait: The customer is placed in a queue. They are 47th in line. There is no option for a callback. They are forced to wait, listening to a tinny tune for 45 minutes, only for the line to drop.
- The Wrong Turn: The customer navigates a complex IVR menu (“Press 1 for sales, 2 for support…”) only to be routed to the wrong department, who then cannot transfer them back, forcing them to hang up and start all over again.
This isn’t just an inconvenience. In the high-stress, time-sensitive environment of a Black Friday sale, it is a direct and frustrating experience.
The long-term brand damage
The revenue lost from an abandoned cart is only the beginning. The real, lasting damage is to the brand. When a customer can’t get through, it sends a clear and damaging message: “We were perfectly prepared to take your money, but we were completely unprepared to take your call.”
It can make the brand look unprepared and unprofessional. That frustrated customer will not just abandon their cart; they may abandon the brand.
They will go to your competitor, and they will share their bad experience, effectively turning your expensive marketing campaign into a customer acquisition engine for someone else.
Re-framing voice as critical infrastructure
Businesses should treat their voice channel with the same priority as their e-commerce platform. It is not a utility; it is critical sales infrastructure. This means asking hard questions before the peak season:
- Scalability: Can your phone system (whether it’s on-premise or in the cloud) handle a 10x spike in call volume, or will it crash?
- Smart routing: Is your system intelligent? Can it route a new sale query to your best agents, while offering a “Where is my order?” an alternative route?
- Contingency: What is the overflow plan? Do you have callback features that let a customer keep their place in the queue without staying on the line?
As we head into the peak retail season, the question isn’t just whether your servers can handle the traffic. The real question is: when that high-value customer, in their moment of panic or purchase, decides to call … will anyone answer?
If you haven’t tested your voice channel as rigorously as your website, you haven’t finished your Black Friday preparations.