How to scale support without burning out your team this holiday season

TL;DR

• Peak season increases ticket volumes, with WISMO queries and returns driving most of the load
• Protect your team first: shorter queues, calmer teams and focus on complex cases leads to better outcomes
• AI agents, like Engaige, can take over repetitive questions, freeing human agents to focus on meaningful, high-impact work

Why the holiday season is so tough for support teams

During peak season many teams slide into the same cycle:

• Agents handle only urgent or angry customers
• Work becomes reactive instead of proactive
• Knowledge work is replaced by copy pasting from tools
• SLAs slip
• Senior agents feel stuck in low value tasks

You probably recognise the feeling: at some point during peak season you see a shift in tone. Your agents sound more tired, small errors appear in replies and training slows down because nobody has free capacity.

This is when burnout begins.It’s not complexity that drains your team, it’s the repetition.

Traditional support methods struggle in peak season 

Most e-commerce support processes are built for average weeks, not for extreme peaks. When volume spikes, many teams rely on longer hours or temporary staff. Both come with limits, especially for the people doing the work.

Manual handling puts constant pressure on your team

When every ticket needs a human to read, understand and respond, busy periods quickly become exhausting. Manually checking multiple marketplaces’ SKUs or verifying international shipping statuses can take hours per day for each agent, leaving no time for complex cases. Your agents end up jumping between tools, policies and edge cases all day, sometimes feeling they’re just firefighting rather than making an impact. That constant pressure wears people down, especially during long days in peak season.

Repetitive work drains energy and motivation

During peak season, agents often answer the same questions repeatedly: order status, returns, address changes… Answering these queries over and over drains focus and morale, leaving tricky or high-value customer complaints unresolved. It’s hard to stay motivated when your day looks the same from morning to evening and complex cases get less attention simply because there’s no time left.

Your team moves into survival mode

With long queues, the focus shifts from doing good work to just getting through the day. Agents skip breaks and feel constant pressure. Stress builds and burnout follows, not because your team lacks skill, but because the work isn’t sustainable.

How AI agents help you scale customer support

AI customer service agents (like Engaige 🙌) don’t replace your team. They remove the work that drains them. They do the repetitive, rule based work that computers are good at, so your team can do the human work. 

A well implemented AI agent can:

• Retrieve live order information through your systems
• Understand your policies and business rules
• Process returns, exchanges or cancellations, when allowed
• Handle multilingual conversations 
• Spot errors or risky situations in orders or input
• Escalate to a human when a case falls outside approved flows

For example, an AI agent can automatically check the status of 100 delayed orders, generate tracking updates, and issue return labels. These simple actions give your agents hours of time back to focus on complex cases or high-priority customers.

By taking the repetitive tasks off your team’s plate, AI eases their mental load, helps stop burnout before it starts and gives agents the breathing room to focus on the work that really needs a human touch.

5 practical tips to scale support without burning out your team

Scaling support during peak season isn’t just about technology. It’s about protecting your team, reducing stress and making sure human energy is spent where it matters most. Here are five practical ways to do that:

1. Protect your team’s energy first

Identify which tickets genuinely need human judgment and which are repetitive or low-value. For example, an agent spending 30 minutes daily manually checking order statuses could instead focus on complex complaints or important customers.

Encourage regular breaks, rotate shifts fairly and avoid piling high-pressure tasks on the same people. Prioritising meaningful work reduces stress and keeps your team motivated. 

2. Automate repetitive tasks

Start with high-volume, low-value tickets: WISMO questions, returns, address changes, and simple policy queries. AI agents like Engaige can handle these end-to-end, checking order statuses, issuing return labels and applying rules automatically. This frees your team from repetitive mental load.

Even without AI, clear internal workflows, checklists or dashboards can cut down on repetitive copy-paste tasks (like sending tracking links) and help prevent mistakes. The aim is to take these energy-draining tasks off your team’s plate, whether they’re handled by automation or manually.

3. Define clear AI-human handovers

Uncertainty creates stress. Make it clear exactly when and how AI escalates tickets to humans and ensure all context is passed along. For instance: a refund outside policy should go to a human with the full order history and AI notes attached. Clear handovers reduce double-checking, save mental energy and actually allow your team to trust the system.

If you’re not using an AI agent, document human-to-human escalation paths. Everyone should know who handles complex cases, so no one is left guessing.

4. Keep human work human

Protect the work that requires judgment, empathy and creative problem-solving. Examples include handling gift delivery complaints, important customer requests, or complex returns. These are the cases your team finds most fulfilling and where human interaction adds real value. Make sure these tasks don’t get buried under repetitive work (whether that’s handled by AI, smart routing, or prioritising high-value cases first).

5. Prepare before peak season

Test systems, workflows and staffing before the first busy period begins. With AI, run real-case simulations and start with low-risk scenarios, expanding gradually. For human processes, review capacity, cross-train team members, and prepare contingency plans for unexpected increases in workload. Confidence in both your people and systems reduces stress and helps prevent last-minute firefighting and your team starts the season feeling prepared rather than overwhelmed.

By following these tips, your team stays calmer, more focused and less likely to burn out, while repetitive, high-volume tasks are handled efficiently, whether by AI or smart team practices. Next, we’ll look at how real brands like Otrium have applied AI to lighten the load and scale support successfully.

How Otrium scaled support with an AI agent

You’re probably familiar with Otrium, an online fashion marketplace. Their support team faced large volumes of repetitive questions about orders, returns and refunds. During peak season this became even more visible.

They built an AI customer service agent, Oliver, with Engaige. Oliver connects to Otrium’s order data and policies. The AI agent can:

• Answer WISMO queries instantly
• Explain return rules for different brands and markets
• Share refund statuses
• Hand over complex cases to human agents with full context

Oliver handled around half of all yearly tickets, giving the team breathing room to focus on complex, high-value cases and reducing stress during peak periods.

As a result, Otrium’s human agents faced less pressure, had more time for complex situations and important customers, while their customers still received fast, human-like replies, even late at night.

The benefits of AI agents for your support team

Introducing an AI customer service agent the right way brings huge relief for your team:

• Fewer repetitive queries: WISMO questions, returns, and policy checks are handled automatically, reducing mental load
• More time for complex cases: Agents can focus on issues that require judgment, empathy, or creative problem-solving 
• Energy for training and quality checks: With repetitive tasks removed, your team has bandwidth to improve skills and processes
• Smoother handovers: AI keeps track of context, so agents don’t waste time retracing steps or double-checking previous responses

Instead of spending their day copy-pasting tracking links or repeating standard answers, your support agents can concentrate on the work that’s fulfilling, high-impact and where their judgment really matters.

How Engaige’s AI agents help you handle peak times

Engaige’s AI agent works well for e-commerce brands in fashion, beauty and consumer electronics because it is designed around how your support team operates.

• Your support volumes rise and fall with campaigns, launches and peak moments
• Most of your holiday and peak season questions follow clear patterns, especially around WISMO, returns and product issues
• Your business rules are specific, from refund logic to shipping rules, and your AI agent needs to follow them precisely

With Engaige you define what your AI agent is allowed to do. The agent uses your knowledge base, policies, order data and API endpoints. It follows your workflows and escalates to your team when human judgement is needed.

Otrium is a good example of this. Their Engaige-built agent, Oliver, now handles half of their yearly tickets instantly. The team gets hours back and their customers get fast, natural replies around the clock.

Across the brands we work with, the outcome is similar:

• Teams feel lighter because the repetitive layer is gone
• Customers get faster, clearer answers
• Support becomes scalable and easier to manage, even in peak season

If you want to understand what this could mean for your own team, use our ROI calculator. In a few seconds you can see how much support cost you could save over the next three years with an AI agent that handles repetitive questions for you, day and night.

FAQs about scaling support without burning out your team

We know support teams have a lot on their plates, so here are answers to the most common questions we hear from teams using AI to manage peak periods. Don’t see your question here? Reach out, we’re always happy to help. 

How can AI agents handle complex customer queries?

AI agents are designed to follow clear logic and policies. When a query requires judgement, negotiation or deeper empathy, the agent routes it to a human with full context included. That way your team spends its energy on meaningful decisions, not on digging through systems or rewriting the same answers all day.

Will automation reduce the need for human agents?

Support automation reduces repetitive work, not human work. You still need people for exceptions, relationship building and edge cases. Most teams use AI to slow down the pace at which they need to hire, while also reducing the workload that can lead to stress and burnout.

How do we train AI to understand our e-commerce processes?

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. With Engaige you can train your AI customer service agent on your policies, workflows, order data and API endpoints. During implementation you’ll test the agent weekly against real cases, refine its behaviour and add guardrails for sensitive flows.

Will AI agents sound robotic or hurt our brand tone?

With Engaige, you always stay in control of the tone of voice. The AI agent matches your brand guidelines so customers feel like they’re talking to your team. This keeps quality consistent, even when your human agents are under pressure.

Are AI agents reliable enough during critical peak moments?

Yes. When you launch ahead of peak season, you can let the AI agent handle only low risk cases first, then expand as confidence grows. In practice, brands see fewer errors in repetitive tasks, faster replies and less pressure on their human agents.

How does automation help prevent burnout in support teams?

AI agents take over repetitive, high-volume tasks. Think order lookups, returns, status updates and policy questions. By removing this constant “mental load”, your team gets more time for meaningful conversations and higher-impact work. That shift reduces stress, context-switching and end-of-day fatigue.

Can AI reduce the pressure during seasonal peaks or unexpected spikes?

Yes. During high-volume periods, AI agents pick up the extra volume of repetitive queries so your team doesn’t face unmanageable queues or extended shifts. This stability helps keep morale high and protects teams from the crunch-time burnout many e-commerce brands experience.

Will implementing AI create extra workload for my support team?

Not with Engaige. Set-up focuses on your existing policies and workflows, while Engaige’s team guides training and testing. After launch, the AI handles repetitive tasks your agents would otherwise have to do, so you reduce fatigue instead of adding another tool your team has to fight with.