Black Friday is Friday, November 27 this year, and Cyber Monday is November 30. The teams that handle it well decide their staffing in September and October, before the queue grows. This guide is a planning document for that decision. It turns last year’s orders and tickets into a week-by-week forecast of how many agents you need, and it sets out what to do each week from late September to late January.
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Who it is for
VPs of Customer Experience, heads of support and founders at US direct-to-consumer brands between $10M and $200M in revenue, who own the holiday support plan and the budget behind it.
What the guide covers
- When holiday volume rises and by how much, from Adobe, Deloitte, Salesforce, NRF and USPS figures
- A capacity model with a full worked forecast, from orders to contacts to agent hours to headcount
- How to size the peak day and the peak hour, not only the peak week
- Overtime, temporary hires, outsourcing and AI deflection compared, with the trade-offs of each
- What to automate and what to keep with a person
- A week-by-week timeline from September to January
- A readiness checklist, a briefing template for an outsourced team and a post-peak review
Three takeaways
1. The peak is longer than Cyber Week. In the worked example, the team needs 3.4 times its baseline size across Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, and still more than twice baseline through the December shipping cutoffs. Online spending on Cyber Monday 2025 was about 3.4 times the season’s daily average, according to Adobe.
2. Returns are a second peak. Retailers expect 17% of holiday sales to be returned, according to the NRF. Contacts per order rise after Christmas even as orders fall, so a team that staffs down on December 26 meets the returns backlog at its smallest.
3. Automate what has one right answer, and test it first. Order status, return starts and policy questions can be deflected. Lost gifts, fraud and exceptions need a person. Put only the automation rate you have measured into your forecast.
About Atidiv
Atidiv runs outsourced customer support for consumer brands in the US, UK and Australia. Last holiday season we resolved more than 200,000 DTC tickets, and we can scale a team by up to 200% within two weeks.
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Ayushi leads Customer Experience services at Atidiv with a strategic/operations-focused mindset. Her primary objective is to increase how well businesses deliver service and retain customers. She evaluates customers' journeys through marketing impact, performance metrics, and gaps to develop improved systems and processes. With a reputation for curiosity and structured thought processes.