For teams with peak seasons
Seasonal peaks and sale weeks
Black Friday should scare your competitors, not your support team. Bots absorb the surge; your people keep their heads.
Brief the bots like you brief the team
A sale week starts before the sale. You add a promo playbook — what is discounted, which codes work where, when the offer ends — and update the help center with the questions you already know are coming: delivery cut-offs, stock, price adjustments. Every bot on every channel is briefed the moment you hit save; there is no morning stand-up to repeat it in.
Then the wave hits, and it mostly does not reach you. Discount code questions, delivery windows, "is this still in stock" — the bots answer the thousandth one exactly as fast as the first. Your team watches the exceptions: the misprinted price, the order stuck in payment, the customer whose gift really cannot be late.
The rush, measured for next year
During the peak, the lane reports show the surge as it happens: which topics are spiking, which bot is carrying the load, where escalations cluster. When a new question starts trending — a courier delay, a code that will not apply — the knowledge gap shows up in plain sight, and one new article closes the stream within minutes of publishing.
When the season ends, the report is the retrospective: what shoppers asked, what the bots closed, which three questions deserve a place on the product page. Next season's briefing writes itself — and nobody spends January recovering from December.
Why peak season hurts every year
Peak weeks triple the queue, but the same few questions make up most of it — delivery windows, discount codes, stock updates.
Temp agents hired for the season answer their first confident ticket around the week the season ends.
During the surge, response times stretch from minutes to days — exactly when shoppers are comparing you against faster stores.
After the rush the team is too burned out to analyze what happened, so next year starts from the same blank page.
A sale week on autopilot
- volume — bots answer the thousandth question as fast as the first
- Any
- seasonal hires to recruit, train and let go in January
- 0
- to brief every bot with a promo playbook before the sale goes live
- Minutes
- auto-resolves for $42 whenever a surge outgrows your plan
- +1,000
Frequently asked questions
- Our peak is ten times normal volume. Can bots keep up?
- Volume is the one thing bots are unbothered by. The answer to the thousandth discount-code question arrives as fast as the first, on every channel at once, in any language. The practical limit is your plan's auto-resolve allowance — and when a surge outgrows it, an add-on pack of 1,000 resolves for $42 covers the spike without upgrading the whole year.
- What happens to the conversations bots cannot close mid-rush?
- They reach your team the way you would want them to at peak: sorted by lane, flagged by urgency and summarized, so an agent opens a thread knowing the story instead of scrolling for it. Even in the busiest week, people see a short, prioritized queue of genuine exceptions rather than the raw flood.
- Do we pay for a peak-sized plan all year?
- No. Size the plan for your normal months and add resolve packs only when a season demands them — $42 per extra thousand, bought when needed. Annual billing takes 20% off the base plan too, so the quiet months subsidize the loud ones instead of the other way round.
- How fast can we be ready for this year's sale?
- Faster than a temp hire clears their first interview. The trial takes an afternoon to start — no card required — and most teams have the first bot answering within a day. Brief it with your promo playbook the week before launch, and it walks into the sale knowing the campaign better than a seasonal recruit ever could.
- Will bots quote dead promo codes or old prices during the sale?
- Only if you would. Bots answer from your knowledge sources, not from memory — when the offer changes, you edit the article once and every bot on every channel switches instantly. Compare that with re-briefing a temporary team mid-rush, and the surprising thing is how many stores still do it by hand.