Holiday Customer Service 2025: 10 Hands-On Strategies

You’ve stocked up on inventory, launched your holiday campaigns, and have your sales funnel locked down. But have you planned for the unavoidable rush of holiday customer service requests?

Starting the Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) weekend and through the end of the year, the pressure and expectations from your support team reach their peak. In 2024, US consumers spent an estimated $241.4 billion online during the holiday season—an 8.7% year-over-year increase—with mobile purchases accounting for 54.5% of all sales. Last year, Shopify brands alone generated $11.5 billion in sales during the shopping weekend—a record expected to rise again in 2025. 

Holiday customer service isn’t just about keeping up with requests—it’s a growth driver that shapes customer loyalty and post-holiday retention. If you want to be the ecommerce brand your customers remember this holiday season—and return to in January—while also running a balanced, healthy BFCM support operation, you’re in the right place. 

This guide shares 10 actionable tips to help prepare for peak season customer service. You’ll learn what’s different for 2025, and why your approach to customer support needs to evolve with it.

Holiday customer service 2025: What’s different this year (data snapshot)

Certain pillars of holiday shopping stand the test of time. Shoppers will search for gifts using both online and offline channels in the ramp-up to the festive season.

Trends making a change to holiday customer service this year include:

• Comfort with mobile spending: Consumers are tipped to spend over $142.7 billion from their smartphones this holiday season—up 8.5% over last year. Shoppers check out directly from their phones and rely on mobile chat for quick support.
• AI-assisted shopping: Last holiday season, Adobe reported a 1,300% YoY increase in ecommerce traffic from generative AI sources like ChatGPT and Google Gemini. The same report found 38% of consumers have already used generative AI for shopping, and 52% plan to do so this year. This upswing in AI usage is reshaping how support teams engage in real time.
• Timing shifts: There’s always some customers who do their holiday shopping at the last minute, but per McKinsey, some are already thinking about it as early as August and September. Estimates from PwC track: They think roughly 80% of planned holiday gift spending will occur by the end of Cyber Monday. Support teams now face a longer, flatter peak season that demands extended coverage and planning.

1. Prepare for the holiday rush

First things first: accept that holidays will definitely bring your customer service team a busy season. With shoppers starting earlier and mobile driving more than half of holiday purchases, forecasting demand accurately matters more than ever. And then, take dedicated steps to prepare for the rush:

• Optimize your support contact forms. Gather as much relevant information as early in the conversation as possible.
• Run product training sessions. Consider video training, up-to-date documentation, and day-long training to equip your in-house customer care team. Don’t forget to prep any outsourced, third-party support.
• Consider customer service automation. Your support tool may offer options like triggers and autotagging, which will lower the manual, admin part of your agents’ workload.
• Forecast demand for support. Review your daily and year-over-year support ticket trends, as well as hourly requests per channel, so you can determine the right coverage for each channel and period.
• Build a workforce management (WFM) forecast. Review last year’s holiday season ticket volumes (including average handling times), plus any promotions or new product launches to anticipate how many customer service agents you’ll need, particularly from November to January. 

It’s never too early to start. “We start drafting preseason and December messaging well in advance. This includes all social media posts, emails, and ad campaigns,” says Steve Pogson, founder of First Pier, an ecommerce agency and a Shopify Partner. 

“The goal is not to wait for the last minute but to have everything ready and scheduled. This approach ensures that our team can focus on real-time customer service issues, not scrambling to get communications out.”

This is also a good time to establish metrics you’ll use to track the success of your customer support team. Some metrics to consider include:

• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): The indicator of customer satisfaction on a scale from zero to 100%
• Customer effort score (CES): The average score of answers to the prompt “[Company] made it easy for me to solve the issue” on a five- or seven-point scale
• First response time (FRT): The average time between a customer reaching out and an agent responding
• First response resolution: How often a customer’s issue is fully resolved during the first interaction with your support team

You can compare these metrics between holidays and the rest of the year and notice any peaks and drops so you can react quickly.

2. Schedule ecommerce customer support

Once forecasts are in place, translate them into real shift coverage to maximize each agent’s time. This might not be necessary when the cadence of BFCM support requests is lower, but a clear schedule makes it a lot easier for agents to solve customer issues once the number of tickets jumps.

Think about:

• Shift plans: You might see more tickets at night, on weekends, or right after major sales events. Arrange staff schedules around these peak times so you’re not overstaffed at slow times or understaffed during surges.
• Rotations: Ensure fair workload distribution and prevent burnout by alternating who works busy days or late night shifts. For long-term employees, consider a “one on, one off” annual schedule if you need support between Christmas and New Year. These rotation plans also help sustain morale during high-pressure periods, tying directly into broader team wellness efforts. 
• Service level agreement (SLA) promises: Set customer expectations—and make sure you can stick to them. If response times will slow down due to volume, share something like: “We’re experiencing high holiday demand. Responses may take up to 48 hours during peak holiday volume. Thank you for your patience.”

At Magnolia, a home and lifestyle brand, the typical customer support schedule includes agents who work on one live channel during the day, like phone or live chat, and rotate around the halfway point during the day. The brand also has one or two people on backup in case of a traffic spike.

But it’s a different story during holidays. “We schedule each agent for certain time frames, so each agent works on their allotted time frame of email tickets, and once they are done with that section of their tickets, they get a new assignment of tickets to knock out,” explains Sam Goff, former guest services manager.

“Our backup agents usually jump straight to phone and voicemails versus emails,” he adds. The team at Magnolia praises this approach for bringing down the number of tickets quickly.

Tip: If you cover a wide range of products or serve a global audience, consider routing support tickets to agents based on their product-specific skill set or a language they speak. Not only will this help them solve customer service requests fast—the personal touch will feel extra delightful to the customer.

3. Set up critical holiday communication channels

You might be tempted to nail every single support channel, but this hectic period might stretch your customer service professionals so thin that they’ll struggle with all of them. 

A better option? Define two or three critical customer support channels for the holidays, then double down on them, whether that’s:

• Email 
• Live chat
• Phone calls
• Social media 
• Mobile apps

The support channels you choose should depend entirely on the audience you serve. With more than half of all holiday purchases now made on mobile, chat and SMS often outperform slower channels like email—making them a smart focus for your BFCM customer support plan. It’s how you’ll prevent spending your time and budget on holiday customer support technology for channels your customers don’t even use. 

Take it from Campus Protein. Their team recognizes that customers are being bombarded by deals, and have a higher than usual purchase intent. Answering their questions quickly is crucial.

“Traditional channels such as email are just not fast enough,” says Tarun Singh, Campus Protein’s chief marketing officer and cofounder. “We use chat, text, and phone support to help minimize our response time, and maximize the customer’s overall experience.”

Once you’ve decided on your channels, proactively share holiday hours, response times, and shipping times on social media, emails, and a website popup as the holidays approach. Also update your Google Business Profile, local store pages, and in-store signage with accurate holiday hours and pickup options. This helps avoid confusion for local shoppers and ensures consistent messaging across every touchpoint.

Proactively setting up your communication channels can help to avoid frustrated customers who don’t get their answer as quickly as expected.

4. Use customer support to enable sales

One of the best things about holiday customer support is that it isn’t—and shouldn’t be—siloed away from sales. In fact, it’s a core part of it. Per PwC, customers who feel appreciated will pay up to a 16% price premium on products, while 17% will walk away after a single negative experience.

Just like sales associates in a physical store, your holiday customer support agents should be fully equipped to answer product-specific questions and help the customer make their purchase decision. Customer service done right directly fuels revenue and loyalty—proven by Zendesk’s 2025 CX Trends report, which found that companies combining human expertise with AI-driven support see up to 22% higher customer retention rates.

Treat customer support as an extension of your sales teams with:

• Pre-sale consultations: Many shoppers reach out with last-minute questions—for example, shipping timelines or gift options. Give in-depth product knowledge training to customer support teams to handle and upsell in-chat. 
• Cart abandonment recovery: Abandonment rates spike during the holidays. Have your customer support team reduce them by reaching out to people who exited their shopping session. For example, “Hi [NAME], we noticed you were checking out our holiday gift set—just wanted to let you know it’s still in stock and shipping is free today!”
• Macro snippets for promotions: Keep campaign messaging consistent by creating reusable snippets for customer agents. This helps build a seamless omnichannel customer experience without sounding overly promotional—for example “Just so you know, our bestselling bundle is 10% off today.” 

Romain Lapeyre, CEO at ecommerce customer service software Gorgias, says this effort is more than worth it: “We’ve found that repeat purchases can be up to four times higher for customers who contacted support and had a positive experience. As an example, if 10% of your customers contact support and have a great experience, you can increase your repeat purchase rate by 30%.”

Another quick win Romain recommends is embedding your marketing efforts into support messages during the holiday season. “Support emails have a nearly 100% open rate—you should take advantage of that,” he adds.

Automation can support these same goals by handling routine inquiries, freeing agents to focus on consultative, revenue-generating conversations.

5. Field common requests with bots and self-service options

Many of your customer queries fall under the category of common requests. These include questions like:

• “How long until my order is here?”
• “How can I return my order?”
• “Where should I enter the promo code?”
• “Can I change the delivery address for my order?”
• “Do you ship to [country]?”

These are quite easy to answer, and generally don’t take your agents long to solve. The problem arises when there is such a high volume of these common requests that they take up a significant portion of your support team’s time, so that they don’t have the capacity to deal with more complex issues.

One solution is a knowledge base or holiday “quick reply” (macro) library that answers FAQs during the holiday season. It needs to be up to date and easy to find—for example, linked in your website footer and purchase confirmation emails. 

Also consider a chatbot that’s always visible at the corner of your website. Upon clicking it, visitors should see commonly asked questions and an option to ask follow-up questions or other questions they haven’t found the answer to themselves.

Yet it’s important to strike the right balance.. While 64% of consumers would prefer that companies didn’t use AI for support, many of them say that a “good” response time is less than one minute. For many brands, some degree of automation is the only way to meet that standard during peak season. 

With AI-assisted shopping now part of the customer journey, defining guardrails for automation is critical. Strike the right balance with chatbot guardrails—predefined rules and boundaries that specify what your chatbot should and shouldn’t handle, and when a human agent should take over. 

To do this:

• Identify safe topics for automation. For example, information that’s retrieved from store policies (shipping, returns, product pages, etc.)
• Create triggers for human escalation. This might be keywords like “angry” or “refund,” or when a customer asks the same question twice. 
• Make chatbot escalation seamless. If the chatbot doesn’t satisfy the customer’s query, allow them to escalate the issue to a human team. Transfer the conversation history so the customer doesn’t have to repeat themselves post handover. 

“When setting this up, let the customer know that the message they’re receiving is an automated response,” says Romain Lapeyre, Gorgias’ CEO. 

“While sending automated responses means that your customers are getting instant answers to their questions, it shouldn’t mean that your support team considers these conversations as closed. Your team should take a look to ensure that the bot responded properly, and answer any follow-up questions if needed.”

Tip: Shopify Inbox pairs with Shopify Magic to create AI-generated responses to common support queries based on store policies.

As your self-service and chatbot systems mature, share those insights with other internal teams so they can spot recurring issues early and collaborate on faster resolutions.

6. Open internal communication

Customer support agents aren’t the only ones under extra stress during the peak shopping season. More orders mean more workload for everyone—including marketing, design, product development, inventory management, and engineering.

How can you ensure smooth internal communication with all that extra workload? Integrate your customer support solution with a tool you use to communicate internally. This way, you can send all the context the other person needs to assist you or jump into the conversation with the customer. No repeating yourself and no loss of information on the way.

A unified commerce platform like Shopify brings order, customer, and inventory data into one place with a 360-degree customer view. It surfaces:

• Previous purchases
• Customer loyalty program status
• Prior customer service interactions
• Promotion participation 
• Preferred shopping channel 

We can see this in practice with a holiday support ticket from a customer who’s upset because their order arrived damaged. Without any additional insight, you might offer a default response to apologize for the damage and send a free replacement. 

The single customer view, however, shows they’re a loyal customer who has never complained before. They live by your Chicago store, have made half of their purchases there, and accrued 400 loyalty points in their account.

A better solution for this customer might be to offer a free replacement available for same-day pickup in the Chicago store. You could also double the value of their loyalty points by way of apology. 

This unified data view also helps identify high-value customers across mobile and in-store touchpoints, ensuring consistent experiences no matter where they shop.

7. Staff and outsource for extra demand

Should you consider outsourcing your holiday customer support team to help with potential overflow? If there’s any chance your current team won’t be able to handle the ticket volume, the answer is yes.

By the time the busy season rolls around, it might be too late to get the additional agents up to speed, so make a decision as early as you can. Use last year’s holiday peak to estimate this year’s volume and plan accordingly.

“You need enough seasonal help to respond to every customer in a timely manner, but the breakdown of channels where these inquiries are coming from is also crucial,” says Amanda Schermerhorn, former operations manager at Darn Good Yarn, an organic women’s clothing brand.

“For example, we learned that a majority of our questions were coming through either live chat or phone calls, which tells us our customers want an immediate response instead of leaving a message.” Darn Good Yarn used that data to hire and train for all of their live support queries over the holiday period.

The holiday season is relatively short-lived. You likely won’t need to hire full-time agents to handle peak season. Outsourcing offers flexibility—but there are considerations when you’re putting external people at the forefront of your brand’s holiday customer support.

What to give outsourcers:

• Prepare detailed documentation. Give outsourcers your current product matrix and macro snippets so they can give the correct advice and communicate in a way that’s on-brand.
• Train ahead of time. Teach agents to use your brand voice and how your products and policies work. Consider role-playing specific scenarios—for example, presales consults and cart abandonment recovery—using previous customer support tickets that model what an ideal response looks like. 
• Establish escalation procedures. Define when the outsourced team escalates to your in-house team, and establish direct lines of communication for urgent issues. 

Boll & Branch, for example, used to assign their outsourced customer support agents to phone calls, but they reconsidered that strategy. 

“We found that from a productivity and quality standpoint, it’s more beneficial for the outsourced team to clear the easy wins,” says Lauren Donnelly, the brand’s former associate director of CX. “This way, our internal teams who have the most access to updated product info can spend their time on inquiries that are harder to solve.”

Outsourcing covers the surge, but the real opportunity comes next—using that strong service foundation to turn first-time holiday buyers into repeat customers.

8. Win with customer service beyond the holidays

Some customers will interact with you for the first time during the holiday season. But when their delight is embedded into your company culture, many will want to buy from you all the time—not just when the holiday promotions roll around.

Keep the momentum going with a retention strategy that covers:

• Warranties and guarantees: Give customers confidence in their purchase with a warranty or guarantee scheme. For example, you could guarantee Christmas delivery before a specific cutoff date or give a one-year warranty on expensive items. Also ensure your holiday returns policy is clearly stated across channels to help build long-term trust.
• Post-purchase delight: Send a personalized “Thank you” note, include a small gift, or offer a discount on their next purchase. These unexpected delights go the extra mile when customers don’t expect it. 
• Personalized follow-up: Show you care about the customer’s experience, not just the sale, with a personalized follow-up after the ticket closes. This might be a how-to guide for the product they bought, or checking in to confirm whether their order arrived on time. 

Post-purchase support is where loyalty compounds—Zendesk data shows repeat purchase rates rising for brands that maintain personalized follow-ups after service interactions.

Take it from Bombas, a comfort-focused sock and apparel brand. Bombas is known for their 100% Happiness Guarantee, a policy that promises to replace or refund items if they’re torn, the wrong size, or even lost in the laundry or disappeared with lost luggage.

The brand empowers their team to live up to the ideals of this policy so they never have to wait for an approval to go above and beyond for a customer.

“The Happiness Guarantee is nothing without smart, passionate people making it real. Our hiring process is rigorous. We look for people who understand that fundamentally, we’re treating every interaction as an opportunity to bring people closer to our brand,” says Drew Stadler, former VP of customer happiness at Bombas.

This is a brand differentiator, and Bombas has the numbers to prove it: Customers who reach out to the happiness team have twice the customer lifetime value (LTV) compared to those who don’t.

Russell Saks, the CEO of supplement brands Campus Protein and BEAM, encourages support teams to be more proactive than usual during the holidays. 

“We model this off of the shopping experience in your favorite retail store, where assistance comes to you instead of the other way around,” Russell says. “This experience is what helps our customers feel confident about their purchase and that they arrived at the right website this holiday season.”

Tip: Personalized support is most effective when your data is unified. Shopify integrates with your point-of-sale (POS) solution, customer relationship management (CRM) platform, enterprise resource management (ERP) system, and inventory management tools to provide a seamless experience—no matter your customer’s preferred sales or support channel. 

Strong customer service doesn’t stop with customers—it extends to how you support and motivate the people delivering those experiences.

9. Support your customer support

The holidays are busy and exciting. But for online businesses and their support teams, they’re also stressful, with risks of frustration, exhaustion, and burnout. 

That’s why making your support reps feel cared for and supported is essential:

• Ensure there are sufficient staff so that everyone can take enough time off and stay healthy and rested. 
• Build stretch breaks or short wellness breaks into shift plans.
• Offer catered meals and snacks, team collaboration, and small appreciation gestures (snacks, small gifts, or team celebrations) to keep morale up.
• Run weekly dedicated one-on-one meetings with the direct manager so each rep can share feedback and touch base on how they’re feeling.
• Start a twice-daily standup. In the morning, discuss the day’s goals and anticipated ticket volume. In the evening, recap wins, share positive customer interactions, highlight top performers, and identify any extra support needed. 

The team at Magnolia ensures there are plenty of built-in breaks and team activities, as well as food, games, and holiday music, so everyone can relax and have fun with each other.

Managers and supervisors also run two daily touchpoint meetings. The morning one is for vision and preparation for the day, while the afternoon meeting is for recapping the day and reading positive feedback that came in for the team. 

“It’s crucial for us to focus on the positive feedback during holidays, because it’s so easy to get wrapped up in the hustle and bustle of the season,” says Sam Goff, former guest services manager at Magnolia.

These daily check-ins also inform your January postmortem review, helping identify what worked—and where added support may be needed next season.

10. Get the support you need

Once the season ends, analyze results and confirm your operations can handle next year’s load. A post-holiday debrief helps figure out what you did well and where you might need extra support next year. If you don’t have one from last year, schedule time for an after-action review in January that covers:

• Total contacts per channel (chat, email, phone, social)
• Peak workload periods and how well coverage met demand 
• Tools or workflows that improved efficiency or caused bottlenecks
• Conversion or repeat purchase impact from support-driven sales

Last year, Shopify businesses recorded $4.6 million in sales per minute on Black Friday—a mere few seconds of outage can result in major financial losses and put your reputation as a reliable shopping outlet at stake. 

What do you need to feel supported, equipped, and ready for this holiday season? What kind of customer support does your ecommerce platform offer? Are there risks of downtime due to high website traffic or transactions? Will it be challenging to manage a larger order and ticket volume in the back end of your online store? Take the time right now to find answers to these questions.

Check uptime rates; if your plan includes priority support, the channels you can use to get support, and the average waiting time. 

For example, Shopify offers 24/7 priority support to brands, reports 99.9% uptime over the past 90 days, and provides help with third-party integrations or finding approved Shopify Partners. 

Reliable infrastructure and responsive support mean your brand can focus on what matters most—delivering consistent customer experiences across every channel. With a unified commerce platform like Shopify, you can connect service, sales, and operations year-round to meet customers wherever they shop.