Black Friday without missed orders: how to set up your alerts

On Black Friday the orders can be processed fine. The alerts that worked all year stop working. At five orders a day you see every one. At fifty, the chat fills up within half an hour, people mute it, and the one real problem that shows up in it wakes nobody.

None of this needs anything complicated, only a few decisions. They are much easier to make calmly this week than on Friday at eight in the morning.

Separate what needs action from what is just information

Most orders need nothing from a human. A paid order with a complete address is processed on its own or packed by the warehouse in queue order. People are needed for what gets stuck: an unpaid order, a failed payment, a shipping mismatch, an outage.

A practical split looks like this:

• One channel only for things somebody has to resolve. Low volume, and every message has an owner. Nobody mutes this channel because there is no noise in it.
• One daily summary for everything else: order count, revenue, how many are still unprocessed. It is read in the morning and in the evening, and nobody gets out of bed for it.
• An e-mail archive, in case you need to look back at what happened.

You have to be stricter than on a normal day. If you leave every order in the main channel during Black Friday, you will be cleaning that channel on Saturday, not reading it.

Decide who owns what

An alert without an owner is a message everyone saw and nobody took. Before the peak, write one sentence for each type of event:

• unpaid order: who contacts the customer, and by when,
• failed payment or shipping error: who handles it,
• shop or payment gateway outage: who makes the call, and to whom.

Then pin that list in the channel. In a small team the same name often appears next to everything. That is fine, as long as you say it out loud so it is clear who is on duty on which day.

Quiet hours and handovers

A phone ringing at three in the morning is only worth it for something that can break before dawn. A new order is not one of those. Agree in advance:

• at night only real outages get through, and the rest waits for the morning summary,
• on weekends one person is on call and everybody knows who,
• when shifts change, the on-call role is handed over explicitly instead of being left to “it will sort itself out”.

If you want the basic overview of ways to hear about an order, see How to find out about a new order immediately. Here we assume you already have a channel and the question is how to keep it readable through the peak.

Test it a week before

The setup is most often tested for the first time under load. A week before the sale, it is worth walking through this:

1. Create a test order and check that the message arrives in the right channel, not the old one.
2. Switch one destination off on purpose and check that you find out about it.
3. Ask a colleague who did not build the setup to tell you what in the channel makes no sense to them.
4. Check that the daily summary arrives at a time when people actually read it.

Half an hour of testing saves an hour of firefighting when customers start writing to you first.

When volume jumps tenfold

Even a well-prepared team can feel swamped in the first hour of a sale. A few simple steps help:

• Do not loosen the rules. The idea of “send everything to the channel so we can see the pace” ruins the channel. The pace is visible in the summary.
• Shorten the summary interval. Instead of one a day you can temporarily have one every two or three hours. It is still a handful of messages, not hundreds.
• Watch the silence. If nothing arrives during an hour when orders normally come in, that is more important news than any single order.
• Clean up after the sale. Put the rules back to normal and write down what slowed you down. By next year it is an exact list of adjustments.

To wrap up

During a sale it helps when every message has a recipient and nobody has to guess what matters. If you want an app built for this, Notify sends events to nine channels and lets you choose which ones go where. It runs in your CMS without touching the shop template, so you can set it up a few days before the peak.