Black Friday / Cyber Monday (BFCM) isn’t just another spike on the calendar. For most ecommerce brands, it’s the Super Bowl of support.
Ticket volumes triple, customer expectations skyrocket, and CX leaders scramble to keep the ship afloat.
KODIF brought together three leaders in customer experience: Craig Stoss (KODIF), Mercer Smith (Boldr), and Jessica-Rose Garcia (OneSkin) for a tactical webinar on how to prepare support teams for peak season without chaos (or burnout).
Here are the biggest takeaways.
Step 1: Audit your systems before the surge
“You can’t set-and-forget your macros and automations.” – Mercer Smith
One of the first red flags Mercer looks for is how often companies update their macros and help desk automations. Promotions change, FAQs evolve, and if your saved replies are outdated, you’ll cause more harm than good.
Pro tip: Review customer-facing FAQs and internal tools every 60 days. Entering peak season with stale content = guaranteed chaos.
Jessica-Rose added: make sure knowledge bases and tools agents rely on are accurate. “Customer happiness equals agent happiness. If your team is walking into BFCM dreading misinformation, you’ve already lost.”
Step 2: Don’t plan to 95% capacity
Many companies plan staffing at 90–95% capacity. It looks efficient on paper until someone gets sick, needs time off, or the unexpected happens.
“Even in normal times you should plan at 80%. For BFCM, anything less and you’re already understaffed.” – Mercer Smith
Workforce planning isn’t just about headcount. It’s about creating breathing room so agents can actually take breaks, reset, and avoid mistakes.
Step 3: Keep quality > quantity
At OneSkin, ticket volume during BFCM grows 6x. It’s easy for agents to slip into “just get through tickets” mode. Jessica-Rose’s solution is to incentivize quality, not speed.
“If it takes 10 minutes to solve a ticket, that’s fine. We don’t sacrifice quality just to keep the queue moving. We reward accuracy, tone, and care over ticket count.”
Her team keeps things consistent year-round so peak season doesn’t require new rules or unfamiliar processes.
Step 4: Support the humans behind support
BFCM isn’t just stressful for customers. It’s grueling for teams, too. Boldr and OneSkin both prioritize emotional and physical support before and during peak:
- Encourage time off before blackout periods start.
- Provide meals and breaks during the chaos.
- Add fun rituals (theme days, short “fun breaks,” Zoom games) to keep morale high.
As Mercer put it: “If your team goes in already burnt out, they won’t just struggle through BFCM, they’ll also collapse in the weeks after.”
Step 5: Combine AI and humans
The role of AI in support came up repeatedly. The consensus: AI doesn’t replace humans, it makes them more effective.
Jessica-Rose shared how OneSkin named their KODIF AI agent “Kelsey” (after their favorite account executive at KODIF!). The team now talks about her like a real teammate:
“They’ll say, ‘Oh, Kelsey flagged this,’ or ‘Kelsey handled that.’ There’s no fear of AI taking jobs because Kelsey frees them from cancellations and order edits so they can focus on deep, human conversations.”
Craig also emphasized that AI isn’t magic. It doesn’t understand your refund policy or your subscription model until you teach it. Perfection comes from iteration and testing, just like coaching a human team member.
Step 6: Reflect and learn after peak
Surviving BFCM isn’t the end of the journey. CX leaders need to reflect, debrief, and improve for next time. Jessica-Rose shared her three-part framework:
- Metrics: Look at first response time, resolution time, AI containment, and customer effort.
- Friction points: Keep a “never again” list of things that broke down (e.g. don’t launch new policies on a Friday).
- Team retro: Host a casual “lunch and learn” with your support team to hear their experiences first-hand.
The bottom line
Scaling support for BFCM isn’t about duct-taping a new chatbot onto your stack. It’s about:
- Preparing systems and FAQs ahead of time
- Planning realistic staffing capacity
- Supporting team morale
- Balancing automation and human judgment
- Learning from each season to improve the next
As Mercer put it: “Anything you want to run during BFCM should already be habit. Don’t try to reinvent processes the week before. It won’t stick.”
At KODIF, we see the same: automation + humans working in sync = less chaos, more clarity, and better customer experiences during the busiest time of the year.
