E-commerce support checklist: what to automate before your next sale
Sale traffic does not create new questions. It creates far more of the same five. A checklist for the fortnight before.
A sale does not change what customers ask. It multiplies it. The same five questions arrive five times as often, compressed into the days when your team has the least slack.
That is good news, because it means the work is predictable. Here is the fortnight before, in the order that pays.
Two weeks out
Find your five questions
Take 200 conversations from your last busy period — not a quiet week, the last comparable peak — and tag each with one word. Sizing. Stock. Delivery. Returns. Discount code.
The distribution will be more concentrated than anyone expects. Those top five are your entire automation project. Everything below them can wait for next time.
Write the answers down as answers
Not policy prose — the sentence you would actually send. If your returns window changes during the sale, write the sale version now, with its dates.
This is also the moment to write the edges, because sale periods generate them: the item bought at full price two days before, the code that does not stack, the pre-order in the same basket as a stocked item. Decide each one now, while nobody is under pressure.
Check that the answers are true on the day
Extended returns, different delivery cut-offs, changed hours. An automated answer quoting the normal policy during a sale is worse than no automation, because it is wrong at volume.
One week out
Put every channel in one queue
If WhatsApp is on a phone and Instagram is with whoever runs the account, the sale will find that out for you. Consolidation the week before is configuration; consolidation during the sale is a crisis.
Decide what escalates, and to whom
Write the list explicitly: anything about a charge, anything about a damaged item, anything where the customer is angry, anything outside the policies above. Name who receives each, rather than sending everything to a shared pile.
Test with real messages
Take fifty real conversations from your last peak and run them through whatever you have set up. Count the ones answered correctly, the ones escalated, and — the number that matters — the ones answered confidently and wrongly. That last count must be zero before the sale, not after.
The week of
Answer at the hours the traffic arrives
Sale traffic is heavily evening and weekend. If your automation is only enabled during office hours, it is off during the peak. This sounds obvious and is a common mistake, usually made by disabling it “until we are confident”.
Watch the escalation rate, not the volume
Volume will be high; that is the point. The number to watch is the share reaching a human, and whether it is climbing. A rising escalation rate mid-sale means a question you did not anticipate is now arriving in bulk — and you can usually fix it in ten minutes by writing one answer.
Keep a note of every question you could not answer
Not to fix during the sale. To fix before the next one. This list is the whole of next quarter’s improvement, and it is free.
After
Count three things
- First response time, split by hour. The evenings will tell you whether availability held.
- Abandoned conversations — people who asked and stopped. This is the sale’s real loss, and it is invisible unless you count it.
- Share handled without a person. Compare it with your normal weeks. If it fell during the sale, your automation was scoped to the ordinary questions rather than the peak ones.
Do the returns wave deliberately
The questions do not end when the sale does. Two to three weeks later the returns arrive, and they are a different five questions. Write those answers while the sale ones are fresh.
The short version
- Tag 200 conversations from your last peak; find the top five questions
- Write the five answers as sendable sentences, including the sale-period versions
- Decide the edge cases now, in writing
- One queue for every channel
- Explicit escalation list, with names
- Test on fifty real messages; confident-and-wrong must be zero
- Automation enabled in the evenings and at weekends
- Watch the escalation rate during; count abandoned conversations after
- Write the returns answers before the returns arrive
Fellix answers product, stock and order questions from your catalogue and policies, on every channel you sell on. See how it works for retail.