Tech Viewpoint: You’re not done with holiday prep

For retail IT departments, the task of preparing for the holidays should only end after New Year’s Day.

Typically, retailers start fortifying their technology infrastructures for the holidays in the late summer and put things on “lockdown” before Thanksgiving arrives. While no new solutions will be added until the seasonal rush is over, the holiday prep process remains an active concern right through Christmas and the following week of returns and gift card redemptions. 

Here are a few examples of holiday prep activities that did not end at midnight Cyber Monday. 

Securing customer data

Study after study has indicated that retail fraud and cybercrime are dramatically on the rise this year, with the heavy transactional volumes of the holiday season serving as extra incitement for criminal activity. Hopefully, you implemented sophisticated, up-to-date security solutions and established strong defensive policies well before it was time to carve the turkey. But this does not mean you can now sit back and sip eggnog.

Throughout the holiday season (and after), retailers need to constantly monitor their networks to ensure all their security efforts are working. This includes deploying solutions that provide real-time visibility into and tracking of events such as unusual transactional activity, unauthorized web script installations, and unexpected traffic patterns. 

Managing peak volumes

The entire retail industry focuses on the five-day period between Thanksgiving Day and Cyber Monday as presenting peak digital traffic and sales volume challenges. Retailers will take extra care to monitor latency, transaction processing speed, and other critical site performance indicators. 

But retailers should really pay close attention to how their e-commerce sites and m-commerce apps are performing through New Year’s. The “Cyber Five” days may represent the most concentrated burst of digital shopping, but other peak volume days have emerged. These include the Saturday before Christmas (Dec. 21 this year), Christmas Eve (Dec. 24), Boxing Day (Dec. 26), and whatever day you set as the deadline for guaranteed shipping before Christmas. 

Unexpected factors, such as weather events, spikes in popularity of a specific item, and regional and demographic variations in product preference, can also create surges in digital visits and purchases. A sudden seasonal increase in consumer demand is a good problem to have, as long as you have the systems and procedures in place to handle it.

Tracking customer sentiment

The holidays are a sentimental time, but you need to make sure customers aren’t expressing their feelings about your shopping experience through negative online postings and comments. Retailers need to aggressively perform “social listening” with solutions that automatically browse social media sites, comment sections of e-commerce sites, blogs, and other highly trafficked web pages for signs of consumer discontent with your products and/or services.

In addition, retailers should be carefully monitoring and analyzing their customer service calls, chats and emails to detect any patterns of specific problems or sources of shopper dissatisfaction. Be ready to quickly rectify issues, even it means taking on short-term expense to avoid the long-term damage caused by negative online chatter.