Your Holiday Surge Staff Is Already on Your Payroll
Every holiday season, call centers light up, call volumes jump, and wait times double, exposing every brittle process you've spent all year hiding. Most executives shrug this off as “holiday chaos”—just the cost of doing business in Q4.
They're wrong. This isn't just a volume problem; it's an accountability gap.
Every abandoned call is a lost sale, a lost renewal, or a future churn risk. Multiply that by tens of thousands of calls per day and you're staring at a margin leak big enough to dwarf your seasonal marketing budget.
The hold music isn't just irritating. It is expensive.
The $7M Holiday Leak
Let's do the math for a mid-sized retailer.
Baseline: 25,000 daily calls at 5% abandonment = 1,250 lost calls/day. At a $40 order average, that’s $50,000 per day in revenue at risk.
Holiday Surge: 35,000 calls at 12% abandonment = 4,200 lost calls/day. That’s $168,000 per day in revenue at risk.
A 60-day holiday window: This means a mid-sized retailer is looking at about $7M silently evaporating from the P&L.
When Service Ops sees this as a queue issue and Finance sees it as a cost of business, nobody is accountable for that $7 million hole. That's how margin quietly disappears without anyone noticing.
My Ops Playbook
These levers aren't new. What’s missing is ownership discipline. If I were running the operation, here’s how I’d assign accountability.
Buffer Management (Queue Planning) Owner:
My Play: Everyone agrees you need a buffer for the holiday surge. Most execs treat "buffer" as "just hire 20% more seasonal staff and hope for the best." That’s not a buffer; it’s an expensive guess, and it still fails when the real peak hits.
My approach may be a little unconventional, but it works in practice. Back when I was part of an EA team, each EA had their own set of people to support. During peak periods, some EAs were slammed with urgent requests from multiple people at once. We’d always reach out to colleagues to see if they could help, which was chaotic. I suggested creating a shared inbox for urgent requests only. If someone was tied up, others could pick up the task seamlessly. It solved the overload problem, ensured nothing fell through the cracks, and kept high-priority work moving.
Applied to a call center, the principle is the same: create a small, trained “overflow pool” for low-complexity tasks—emails, shared inbox questions, or basic FAQs. Skilled agents stay focused on revenue-generating calls. A small incentive keeps participation voluntary and motivated.
P&L Risk Stopped: This method is far cheaper than hiring a massive seasonal army. It prevents queue collapse, protects skilled agents from overload, and safeguards millions in revenue that would otherwise leak during the holiday surge.
Handle Time (Consistent Processes)
My Play: Back when I worked in QA of a call center, I’d constantly hear agents go off script for standard answers. Everyone tracks Average Handle Time (AHT), but most operations treat it like a result that needs to be managed with coaching. During a surge, that’s too late. AHT becomes an unstable variable that can collapse your staffing model.
I’d treat AHT as a design input to be controlled. That means rigid, fixed procedures for the top 5–10 call types that make up 80% of your surge volume. I know agents and some managers hate this; they want flexibility. From my experience, though, flexibility is chaos when the queue is on fire. A predictable AHT is the only way to make the staffing model from a scientific forecast actually work.
P&L Risk Stopped: This move turns AHT from a wild-card variable into a fixed cost. It lets you staff scientifically, capping labor-per-call, and more importantly, it’s the only way to guarantee throughput and stop bleeding revenue from queue overload.
Forecasting (Leveling the Workload) Owner
My Play: I’d tell the team, I dont want your sales forecast. I want an operational demand forecast. This means modeling call, chat, and email arrivals by 15-minute intervals, not just by week. Then, I’d apply queueing theory (like Erlang-C) to that model.
P&L Risk Stopped: This approach stops the mismatch between staff and demand. Most forecasts are built on averages, which guarantees failure during peaks. This approach defines the minimum staff required to hold abandonment rates low and capture that $7M in revenue, preventing both excess labor cost (overstaffing) and massive revenue loss (understaffing).
Immediate Quick Wins
For Ops leaders who need to act now, here is my immediate playbook.
Freeze core shifts two weeks before peak.
The Generic Version: "Freeze core shifts two weeks before peak."
Everyone does “shift freeze,” but most let it be flexible or ignore the top-call types. I mandate a rigid schedule for core agents covering the 80% of calls driving surge volume. Data from Salem Solutions shows that undertrained or constantly shifted seasonal hires can be 40% slower at resolving issues. I’ve seen this in action during my time in QA. Locking shifts and scripts prevents chaos from spilling into every call.
Deploy AI-assisted triage for the top 3 FAQ calls.
The Generic Version: "Deploy AI-assisted triage for the top 3 FAQ calls."
Most leaders hear "AI" and deploy a "greeter" bot that just frustrates people and ends with "please hold for an agent." That's far from helpful. I’d identify the top 3-5 high-volume, zero-value calls like "Where's my order?", and build an AI/IVR that resolves them 100% without an agent option. According to Salesforce data, AI can handle 22% or more of customer sessions. I'd take that 22% of volume completely off my P&L and free up my skilled agents for calls that actually generate revenue.
Assign a P&L Owner, Not a "Queue Manager"
The Generic Version: "Assign a single queue owner with daily P&L reporting."
My Play: This is the one everyone thinks they do, but they get it wrong. I'd appoint one person as the "Queue P&L Owner" for the peak season. Their job is NOT to hit a 90/30 Service Level. Their job is to minimize the daily revenue-at-risk number. I'd give them a live dashboard showing "Abandoned Calls" and "Est. Lost Revenue" as their #1 metric. When the job is to protect revenue, not just answer calls, the entire operational focus changes.
Build a Tier 2 Surge Team
Why? “Overflow” can’t be a panic button you hit once the queue is already collapsing. I’d take a small group from departments like Marketing or Finance, cross-train them on one simple email type (let's be honest, they won't want to do phone calls), and create a dashboard that automatically pings them when wait times hit a threshold (e.g., 90 seconds). This builds real capacity without hiring extra seasonal staff.
Treat Ops as a System, Not a Storm
Holiday chaos isn't inevitable. It's the result of systems designed without buffers, without surge planning, and without accountability for the money at stake.
The question isn't “how long will customers wait?”, it's “how much revenue are we prepared to lose?”
If your call center is about to face its holiday stress test, don't wait until January to do the autopsy. The leak is happening in real time and is entirely preventable.
This isn't about customer patience. It's about operational ownership. Assign one name to the queue. Give them ownership of the numbers. Then watch the pour stop.
Start by assigning that ownership today and mapping your top 3 call types for triage. Every day you wait, that $7 million leak gets bigger. Assign ownership first thing tomorrow.