The holiday squeeze: more questions, fewer people
Holiday periods create a nasty pincer for support: demand often rises — gift buyers, travel plans, year-end deadlines — exactly when your team most wants and deserves time off. Handled without a plan, you get either burned-out staff working through the holiday or a silent chat that greets customers with no one home. A little planning avoids both.
Map coverage against expected demand
Start by being honest about which days will actually be busy and which will be dead. Not every holiday day needs the same coverage — the run-up to a gift holiday may be frantic while the day itself is quiet. Match a light, fair rota to the days that genuinely need it, rather than either staffing every day or going dark across the whole stretch.
Write the closed days down somewhere the product can see them, too, not just the rota. Marking them on your business calendar is what stops response targets counting the hours nobody was ever meant to be working, and the built-in holiday presets will fill in a year of the obvious ones in a few seconds — leaving you to add the days that are yours alone, like an end-of-year shutdown or an all-hands afternoon.
Set expectations, don't pretend to be fully open
Customers are forgiving about holidays if you're honest. A clear message — “we're on reduced hours over the holidays; leave a message and we'll reply on the 2nd” — sets an expectation people accept. What frustrates them is a chat widget that looks live, sits unanswered, and never explains why. Honesty about reduced coverage beats a false promise of full service.
Protect the team while staying reachable
The goal isn't to grind a skeleton crew through the holidays — it's to stay reachable without burning anyone out. Rotate light shifts fairly, lean on an offline-message path for the quiet stretches, and prepare canned answers for the predictable holiday questions so whoever is on can move fast. Reachable and rested beats always-on and resentful.
How MyLiveChat fits
MyLiveChat's operating-hours controls and offline message path let you scale coverage down honestly over a holiday while still capturing every enquiry as a lead. Canned responses keep holiday answers fast and consistent for whoever's on the light shift, and transcripts make the handback after the break seamless — so reduced coverage never means lost customers.
Holiday chat is a different shape, not just a smaller version
Two things change at once over a holiday period, and planning usually accounts for only the
first. Staffing drops, obviously. But the demand curve also changes shape: for retail and
anything gift-adjacent, volume rises sharply and shifts into evenings and weekends, while the
question mix moves toward delivery deadlines and returns. Planning a holiday rota as
“normal service with fewer people” misses that the busiest hours have moved.
For B2B and professional services the inverse applies — volume falls away, but the
enquiries that do arrive are often from people working through a quiet period with real
authority to buy.
Decide coverage honestly, then publish it
The most damaging holiday pattern is a widget that stays visibly live while nobody is
watching it. A closed sign is respected; an ignored open sign is not. Whatever you choose,
publish it in the places people will actually look: the widget itself, your contact page, order
confirmations, and the auto-reply.
Three workable models:
- Reduced hours, fully staffed. Shorter window, normal service inside it. Usually the best experience per unit of effort.
- Skeleton coverage with a triage rule. One or two people, an explicit list of what gets handled now versus after the break, and an honest response time for everything else.
- Closed, with capture. Chat collects messages and states plainly when a reply will come. Perfectly respectable if the stated date is met.
Whichever you pick, put the actual return date in writing. “We are back on the
2nd” is reassuring; “we will respond as soon as possible” is not, and it
generates chase-up messages that make the backlog worse.
The deadline questions dominate, so prepare them
In the run-up to any gifting holiday, a large share of chat volume collapses into a handful
of questions. Prepare exact answers in advance, as canned responses, with real dates in them:
- The last order date for delivery before the holiday, by shipping method.
- Whether the returns window is extended for gifts, and precisely until when.
- Whether an order already placed will arrive in time.
- What happens to orders placed during the shutdown.
- Which support is available on the days themselves.
Two rules on the cut-off date. State it early and everywhere rather than only in chat, and do
not let agents improvise exceptions once it has passed — a promise made in good faith at
the cut-off becomes a complaint on the other side of the holiday, when nobody is there to fix
it.
Look after the people covering
Someone works the holiday, and how that is handled sets the tone for the year. Ask for
volunteers before assigning, rotate the least popular slots rather than defaulting to the same
juniors, and make the shifts short — a quiet four-hour holiday shift is far more sustainable
than a full day alone. Whoever is on should have a named person to escalate to; being the only
one online with no backup is what makes holiday cover feel like a punishment.
Practical detail that matters more than it sounds: make sure the person covering actually has
the access they need. Discovering at 11am on a public holiday that only the absent manager can
authorise a refund turns a quiet shift into an unpleasant one.
Plan the re-entry
The first day back is reliably the worst day of the period, because everything deferred
arrives at once alongside normal volume. Treat it as a peak in its own right: staff it more
heavily than a usual day, work the backlog oldest-first, and send a short acknowledgement to
anyone who has been waiting before starting on resolutions. People tolerate a wait they were
told about; they do not tolerate returning to silence.
What to measure
Compare response times inside your stated holiday hours against your normal service level
— the promise you published is the bar, not your usual one. Track the backlog size on
return and how long it takes to clear, and note which questions dominated. Next year, the answer
to the biggest one belongs on the website before the season starts, not in the chat queue during
it.