Black Friday Comes Again

So it's that time of year where we all go collectively mad in the herd stampeded for bargains in the run up to christmas.

It's time to reflect that this sort of consumer fever is driven by mobile users and that the statistics are quite incredible for sales and year on year growth.

I know that not every business is involved in direct sales to consumers or that every market in the world is dominated by Christmas. However, many businesses have spikes in activity driven by certain times of the year. Local religious holidays are only one example. In the UK, the number plate registration scheme changes the primay letter on the number plate at fixed times in the year. This triggers not only discounts on cars with the previous period's plates, but also car loans and insurance renewals. Summer time often drives spikes in behaviour around drinks and ice cream sales, and school holidays drives resort bookings for travel in many parts of the world.

The important issue is that sales are increasingly being forced down the mobile access route and businesses need to plan for capacity spikes. This is great news if they are running on cloud platforms, but they should still be running planning sessions and exercises to ensure that they can scale. also they need to look at the back office and operational processes of their businesses to ensure that they can fulfil sales quickly, accurately and efficiently with minimal errors. As many digital businesses only work if they have rock solid operations in the "bricks and mortar" world.

Fundamental to this is the customer experience on digital platforms, IoT type instrumentation throughout the fulfilment process (with real time BI to monitor the situation for load, capacity and bottlenecks) and proven scalability, as there often are little niggles in scaling up cloud infrastructure in a responsive manner.

In the end, there needs to be a contingency plan to deal with SNAFUs such as problems with cloud platforms, which occassionally occur and some planning to deal with the types of security vulnerability which can occur when people, processes and systems are stressed by volume.

So balck Friday (or its equivalent) should be included as a major scenario for evaluation in any business's contingency planning.