We analyzed seasonal hiring and CX AI data from our top retail brands.
Flipโs voice AI for customer service and call automation capabilities can ensure a smooth holiday season as call volume spikes. As the busiest shopping season of the year ramps up, CX teams are navigating seasonal hiring challenges. Here are retail brandsโ top considerations when it comes to people and hiring during the holiday surge, and how the right team and CX AI platform can mitigate challenges.
The most frequently-occurring planning considerations by the CX teams of Flipโs top retail clients as it relates to employment, training, & seasonal hiring.
Flip’s retail and ecommerce clients consistently raised three operational considerations tied to seasonal call-volume spikes outside of direct customer calls: seasonal hiring & training, employment questions, and holiday hours & coverage planning.
Seasonal Hiring & Employee Calls
Seasonal hiring โ across all departments โ can create downstream call-volume problems. When brands onboard a large group of seasonal employees, those hires generate inbound HR and employment-verification calls that can clog customer service lines, creating a new challenge for CX teams. Flip can quickly turn on new custom intents built specifically to deflect or route these non-customer calls. These anticipatory adjustments can ease volume during peak season.
Holiday Hours
Holiday hours configuration is another critical pre-peak activity that has direct staffing implications. Flip delivers hands-on strategic support to configure temporary closures, shutdown messages, holiday return windows, and pre-scheduled holiday messaging.
Automation Absorbs Volume, Reducing Headcount
Even with higher call volume and new challenges, retail CX teams are actively reducing overseas seasonal headcount by using Flip to absorb call volume. Flipโs automation capabilities handled the call volume surge so well last year that retail brands are reevaluating their usual seasonal hiring plans this year; such high numbers of temporary customer service staff arenโt needed in the same way. One enterprise retail brand is the clearest example: they cut offshore hiring specifically because of Flip and are treating it as proof-of-concept for this year.
Voice AI as Quality Assurance
Voice AI for CX teams leads to quality improvement, too: Flipโs AI is already trained in the product, in the brand voice. Training speed is the #1 staffing challenge; two brands in particular highlighted that rapidly onboarding seasonal CX agents is difficult, and Flip’s routing/IVR features are being used as a safety net for under-trained agents. No potential missteps for new hires still ramping up in product knowledge during the busiest, high-pressure time of the year.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
for Seasonal Hiring + Retail CX AI During the Holiday Season
- Anticipatory adjustments can ease call volume during peak season.
- Seasonal hiring surges create training & coverage challenges that Flip’s CX AI helps mitigate
- Employment-related calls (verification, applications) spike during seasonal hiring and need specific deflection adjustments
- Brands are actively reducing overseas and seasonal hiring counts by using Flip to absorb call volume, even building it into their roadmaps as a cost-reduction strategy.
- Holiday hours confusion can impact staff. Flip delivers hands-on strategic support to deliver holiday hours and temporary closure messaging.
- Deliver savings with automation: It costs $1.30โ$1.50 per Flip automated voice call vs. an estimated $7โ$10 to handle that same call with a live agent โ netting retail clients roughly $5.50โ$8.50 in savings per automated call (exact per-call savings vary by client)
