A Support Manager’s Guide to Black Friday Volume

On the calendar, the Black Friday period can look like just a weekend, ending with the desperately dated-sounding “Cyber Monday” (or BFCM, for those in ecommerce). Really, it’s only one blow in the crushing commerce combo that starts with Halloween, continues through Black Friday, then Christmas, and ends with a January flood of returns.

It’s there every year, even though the scale consistently catches businesses by surprise. Get it right and you can refill your bank balance and land a load of new customers. Get it wrong and things can go very badly indeed, as Hanifa’s Anifa Mvuemba discovered when a too-successful Black Friday sale forced her business to hit “pause.”

While at Paperless Post, Ashley Hayslett led her support team through several Black Friday sales rushes and grew to appreciate the benefits of planning and preparation.

Whenever you’re reading this, there is something you can do today that will help your team and business make it through the busiest days ahead.

Forecast the wave

Last year’s sales and support request numbers are the best data you’ll have to predict the size and shape of this year’s volume. Work out your support-tickets-to-orders ratio during last year’s October–January rush period. That is, how many support tickets arrived per order you took. That’s a good baseline.

Next, take into account anything that might significantly shift those numbers. Ask for a sales forecast from the right person on the team, and adjust for things it may not cover. Are you planning to run an extra advertising campaign? Do you have new products launching, or a new partner who’ll be sending you orders?

Estimate orders from sales dollars: Projected orders = forecasted sales ($) ÷ average order value during last year’s sale period (as seasonal discounts may reduce the average)

Estimate additional orders from advertising the forecast doesn’t include: Additional orders = extra advertising spend ÷ cost per acquisition

Now add those together and multiply the total by your support-tickets-to-orders ratio to predict the support tickets you’ll need to handle. Let’s work through an example:

Henching.supplies sells everything a henchman might need to protect their boss. From last October through to January, they took 46,000 orders and answered 13,800 support tickets.

13,800 tickets ÷ 46,000 orders = 0.3, or 30 tickets for every 100 orders.

The sales team is forecasting $2.4 million over the same period this year. The average order value in 2026 is $60, but during last year’s Black Friday weekend, discounts brought that down to $50. Still, a whole lot of shark food and laser beams.

$2.4 million ÷ $50 per order = 48,000 orders.

Add to that the 2,000 orders expected at the newly revived HenchCon, and that’s 50,000 orders. Applying the ticket ratio from above, that’s 15,000 support tickets the team will need to handle.

Looking at last year’s help desk reports, it seems 70% of tickets land in the six weeks from mid-November to Christmas. So for that period, the team should expect 10,500 tickets over 42 days, or 250 per day.

The team leader confirms their team can handle around 50 tickets per day. 250 ÷ 50 means five support people full time (assuming a seven-day workweek!), when they only have four people right now. Not even henchmen will work those hours, so they’d likely need three more people working five days to get through the rush. How will they avoid being three people down for six weeks?

Scaling up

It can take weeks to get a new person up to speed, and that’s after you’ve gone through the whole hiring process. If you’ve got the budget, and you know that you’ll still need the headcount after the surge ends, hiring ahead of time is a smart move. Help Scout has a good help desk staffing calculator to make your case.

Hiring permanent staff isn’t the only option, though, and it may not be the best option even if feasible. Here are a few hiring alternatives to consider, and the time investment they may need:

Improve your self-service — 1 to 6 weeks

Invest in creating additional help pages and updating your existing ones, targeting your most common support questions. Add an AI bot that can be the first line of help for customers, directing them to that help content, answering them directly, or collecting additional information before passing them on to your support team.  

Cross-train your team — 1 to 3 weeks

Some companies are able to call in short-term help from across the company because they’ve trained up their staff to handle some portion of the incoming support questions. If you have former support staff now in other parts of the organization, consider asking them to chip in — they’ll be even more helpful.

Scale up with an external team — 1 to 3 weeks

Find a partner who can quickly apply their skilled staff to your company’s specific requirements at the level you need. That can range from a couple of people in your existing help desk to a full support department offering logistics, management, and reporting.

For our example company, Henching.supplies, these are all good options. Improving self-service resources is a win at any time of year and should always be a first choice. However, they don’t have the budget to hire full time, nor the need for that capacity all year round. When you need three experienced people for six weeks, as soon as possible — that’s exactly what an external team is for.

When outsourcing is a win

Outsourcing, despite its (often well-earned) reputation for cheap and low-quality service, isn’t just about saving money. Seventy percent of companies said cost savings were their main reason for outsourcing in 2020, compared with just 34% in 2024, as Prialto quotes from Deloitte. Access to skilled people and the ability to move quickly were their new primary reasons.

That’s exactly what you need when under pressure at this time of year. Skip the long hiring process and the start-date wait, and bring in people who have done the job before and are ready to go. Then when the rush of returns has ended, you can scale back down to your in-house team.

There are different ways to implement an outsourced team. One is to bring skilled agents into your current help desk, managed by your own team leader. The other is called “managed operations,” where you bring in a team leader who looks after the whole outsourced group, does QA and training, and reports back to you.

There’s real time to be saved, but it’s not magic. The new agents will need to know your company and products, and they need to learn your tone and your policies. The earlier you can start, the more comprehensive the process can be. So the best time to start is right now, if you haven’t already.

Here are some tips to get you started:

1. Give your external team the fact-based questions first. The ones that are already in your knowledge base but that customers will still frequently ask.

2. Share your saved replies (after you’ve confirmed they are up to date).

3. Create or share a voice guide with lots of real examples to learn from.

4. Give them clear policies to follow. For example, around refunds, escalations, and abuse.

5. Create logins for the tools they need to use.

6. Set up a QA system, or ask them how they manage QA so you can monitor their work.

As for Henching.supplies, they'll bring on the three team members they need, just in time to be on deck for November, preparing for the rush.

Prepping for Black Friday

In the lead-up, your primary jobs are to collect all the information that will make your support team’s lives easier, and to reduce the risk of anything upsetting your plans.

That means knowing the dates promotions will run, what discounts might be in play, and any new products that might go live. And it might mean talking with your website and engineering leaders to ask for a change freeze before the busiest period starts.

You’ll also update your team plans: who to call and what to do if the payment processor breaks, how to talk to customers about it, and steps to follow if the volume suddenly doubles. It’s much easier to decide ahead of time what the best approaches are for tricky situations than to do it live when it’s happening around you. You can’t predict everything, but there are plenty of situations you can. Your external partner, if you have one, has seen many more things go wrong and will probably be willing to share ideas.

Influx.com has a free BFCM support planning guide which includes a good checklist for that final week. Worth a review now, because before you know it, Black Friday will arrive.

Working for the (BFCM) weekend

In the days immediately before, and over the weekend itself, everyone will be heads-down working through the queue. As a team leader or manager, though, you need to keep an overview of the team and the volume.

Monitor your response times and your customer satisfaction rates as a rough guide to queue health. If things are starting to get out of balance, it might be time to shift your resources around.

Implement a triage system to identify the most urgent questions, and the questions that can safely be left for a while. Help Scout’s triage process has some good ideas you might adapt.

All the plans you’ve worked on should now be in play — your team should have the power to make quick decisions with clear guidance, and the “in case of emergency” documents will be readily available.

There is no way but through, though good preparation makes the path smoother and avoids the worst of the pitfalls.

Beware of burnout

No matter how smooth and well planned the process, a sustained period of high-volume work is exhausting for your team. Burnout and subsequent turnover are an increased risk whenever volumes are high.

For managers, the job is to spot the embers early and act on them. People won’t always tell you when they’re sinking, and they may not even identify it themselves for a while. Watching for changes in people’s handle time, escalation rate, and quality scores may give you an early indication of burnout issues.

Handling burnout is really about fixing the work environment. Make sure people know their shifts as early as possible so they can plan their lives, offer (and protect) time outside the queue to work on other projects for the team, and simply ask them what they need.

Having enough coverage to spread the burden underlies all of this, and that’s where your surge cover can do double duty, helping to get your team through the hard patches and into the new year.

January, start the year off fine

By the new year, the nature of the queue will have changed. Less “where is my order!” and more “how can I return this terrible jumper my mother-in-law bought for me, possibly as a passive-aggressive insult?”

Much of the post-Christmas volume can be addressed through notifications and good self-service resources.

Returns are harder — 15% to 20% of online sales come back, according to the National Retail Federation. Taking our Henching.supplies example, that would mean close to 10,000 returned orders and thousands of January tickets.

So if your budget permits, consider extending some of your surge support resources into the first few weeks of January. Give your internal team some room to breathe! A well-run, simple return process with clear policies can help turn an unhappy customer into a loyal one.

Learn the lessons

After making it through the rush, you might be tempted to immediately pretend it never happened and relax into a calmer life. Unfortunately, there are only seven months before preparation needs to start again. So if you can face it, take some time for a retrospective while you still remember what happened.

Check the ratio you calculated in advance. Did it hold up, or should you adjust for next time? Did your peak volumes exceed your predictions? What was missing from the sales forecast that could be added next time? Find more helpful questions in this LinkedIn post, Scaling for Seasonality.

Ask your team what worked for them, which help docs were wrong or missing, and what dashboards or tools they wished they had. Find out who’s feeling good, and who might need some care. Update all your plans now, so that when August rolls around again you’ve got a big head start.

Good preparation doesn’t fix everything, but it can sure make things easier on you, your team, and your customers.