For brands and retailers, Black Friday Cyber Monday, or BFCM, is the most highly anticipated time of the year. It’s the Super Bowl of shopping. It’s the Met Gala of e-commerce. The Oscars of purchasing. The World Series for deal-hunters… Well, you get the idea.
Each year, brands big and small hustle to ensure their digital infrastructures—think e-commerce stores and related tools—are shored up and ready to handle a tidal wave of omnichannel visitors looking for deals.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, 2021 was a little different as the global supply chain continued to adapt to the impacts of the ongoing pandemic. In fact, this year US Black Friday online sales fell slightly from $9bn in 2020 to $8.9bn in 2021 as people spread out their shopping, marking the first time US Black Friday online sales have dropped year-over-year.
Despite a small drop in results, Black Friday and its sister event Cyber Monday still drove incredible amounts of traffic to ecommerce sites this year, even as retailers fielded requests from customers across channels including social platforms and chat apps. Heyday by Hootsuite was there to help manage the madness for some of the world’s top brands, with a little help from conversational AI.
Come along as we dig into data from some of our retail customers, and find out how Heyday helped them automate their way to success during the busiest shopping day of the year.
Let’s go!
Conversation volume
During the four days of BFCM, Heyday conversational AI chatbots managed nearly 90,000 conversations—that’s over twenty thousand chats per day. For the full month of November, Heyday handled well over half a million chats with personalized automation. That’s a lot of “Where’s my order?” questions answered immediately, accurately, and without any human input. Hello, efficiency!
Automation rate
The combined automation rate for the thousands of conversations Heyday AI chatbots handled during BFCM topped 70%—meaning seven out of 10 chats initiated by users were handled entirely by AI. (Did you know that ROI is spelled h-e-y-d-a-y?)
CSAT
Teammates using Heyday reported an average CSAT (or customer satisfaction score) of up to 75%. Happy customers, happy brand.
Looking at these numbers, we can see how retailers are leveraging conversational AI to handle high volumes of repetitive inquiries, saving time, and lowering costs. By automating FAQ responses and other low-value interactions, these brands can now focus on higher-value engagements (think upsells) and more complex customer care situations.
And Heyday isn’t just for customer care—our smart chatbots can show personalized product recommendations to customers directly in chat, creating fresh sales opportunities with every message.
Black Friday Cyber Monday is done for 2021, but savvy retailers know that 2022 is just around the corner. Now is a great time to think about how conversational AI can make your life easier the next time BFCM comes around.
Find out how Heyday can automate FAQs for your brand (and more) by booking a demo today.