The only CX playbook you need before Black Friday

Aug 14, 2025

Team,

ICYMI, Yotpo made a big announcement last week. We’re refocusing the company and sunsetting Email and SMS. It was the right call for customers and for product depth, and it also meant saying goodbye to teammates who built a lot of what people love.

The week turned intense quickly. A handful of agency bros tried to spin chaos for clout and a few bucks of revshare.. I spent about 36 hours on LinkedIn trying to create clarity, stop bad information from spreading, and provide real help to the customers and affected employees who needed it.

The newsie skipped a week. Not planned. By the time I looked up, my calendar, inbox, and DMs were a wall of urgency. I shut everything else down and dealt with it. That’s the reality sometimes.

This week, let’s chat about Q4 and BFCM prep, and burnout prevention. In CX, this isn’t a quick burst of a few busy days. It’s a six-to-eight-week sprint that begins long before the first “Black Friday” promo goes out.

The prep is massive, and work hours are long. And while most are at the mall, watching football, or sitting around a Thanksgiving table, CX teams are on live chat, triaging tickets, and keeping the whole thing from falling apart. The goal is to finish December with a team that’s steady, proud, and ready to run it back again in 2026.

Let’s dive in.

This week’s newsie is brought to you by Gorgias!

To the CX leaders reading this, I’ve got to say it:

Legacy tools are killing your vibe.

You’ve scaled your product, your storefront, and your paid strategy. But somehow, support is still running on outdated helpdesk software that feels like it was built for a call center in 2011.

Let’s be real: during high-volume moments like BFCM, “good enough” just doesn’t cut it.

And Z******? It wasn’t built for ecommerce, or speed, or scale.

The result?

Burned-out teams, shoppers dropping off mid-cart, and CX leaders juggling 5+ apps just to triage a return.

That’s why so many of the brands I know and admire are switching to Gorgias.

And I mean real ecommerce brands. They’re companies that care about their customers, their teams, and the experience on both sides of the screen. They’re not just swapping platforms — they’re adopting a new mindset.

The team at @Gorgias is bringing some of the best in the game together for a live session:

Making the Switch to Gorgias: Real stories from CX leaders who left the old tools behind and built support strategies that scale smarter (and more humanely).

It’s hosted by my friend Jeremy Horowitz (CEO at Let’s Buy a Biz!), and he’s joined by legends like:

Cati Brunell-Brutman, Head of CX at Glossier
Max Wallace, Director of CX at Tommy John
Katy Eriks, Director of CX at SuitShop

They’ll share how they made the leap, how the migration actually works, and what it feels like to go into BFCM without 60-hour weeks, last-minute hires, and inbox chaos.

You’ll walk away with clear examples, tactical insights, and maybe even the push you need to stop settling for “fine.”

👉RSVP here to hear directly from the people who’ve made the switch — and never looked back.

This holiday season can be faster, smarter, and burnout-free.

Let these leaders show you how.

Burnout in CX shows up when work turns reactive, repetitive, and disconnected from purpose. The fix lives in systems, leadership behavior, and a clean split between human work and machine work. Below is the playbook I’ve used. Copy it, ship it, tweak for your margins and model.

1) Set leadership guardrails before the sprint

Leaders teach teams how to behave. Boundaries on paper do nothing without visible follow-through.

Quiet hours outside local work time. Emergencies only.
A coverage calendar with named owners for every block.
Public praise for thoughtful saves, proactive prevention, and clean escalations.
Private coaching for misses. No public shaming.
One decision maker per shift for policy exceptions.

At OLIPOP, we ran Mental Health Fridays. During Q4, we shifted to half days or staggered time. The point stayed intact. Rest is scheduled like any other deliverable.

2) Do the October hardening

A heavy inbox is guaranteed. Drowning is optional. Use October to remove friction.

Make sure all macros are helpful:

Delete stale or duplicate macros.
Keep personalization lines at the top and bottom for a human touch.
Centralize policy snippets so one edit updates every macro.

Rules, tags, and views that triage for you:

Auto tag phrases such as cancel, address change, and order edit.
Route high-risk tags to priority views with tight SLAs.
Split SMS and chat into live queues. Email gets its own cadence.
Add VIP and influencer tags from your CRM to drive faster routing.

Escalation map:

One named contact per partner team. Ops, warehouse, finance, site, marketing.
A one-pager with the inputs each contact needs. Order number, photos, timestamps, SKU, ship method, and whether the customer is VIP.

Self-serve that actually works:

Order lookup, returns and exchanges, delivery issue flow.
A short holiday shipping explainer for order confirmation and PDPs. Clear expectations reduce ticket volume and agent stress. This will single-handedly halve your ticket inbound.

Capacity model:

Average handle time times forecasted volume equals staffing need.
Lock contractor/PT help early if margins allow. Late hires create scramble energy and poor training.

3) Give machines the grind and humans the meaning

Volume during Q4 brings the same intents on repeat. It’s generally the same four questions over and over. This is where AI and automation earn the budget.

Automate WISMOs, password resets, address updates, return eligibility checks, subscription changes within policy.
Push tracking links, RMA links, and policy questions automatically.
Offer a clean path to a human when the intent falls outside the rails.
Log every auto resolution to a tag so reporting shows the lift.

Outcomes that matter to humans: fewer copy-paste moments, more complex saves, more proactive outreach, more coaching. Agents finish shifts with energy, not resentment.

4) Design shifts that protect the brain

Eight hours in a single mode burns people out. Rotation keeps the mind fresher.

Roles per shift:

Triage
Replies
Escalations
Community/Social
Live chat or phone
QA and macro tuning
Runner for cross-team unblocks

Cadence:

Rotate roles every two to three hours.
The runner handles every Slack to Ops, Warehouse, or Site so others stay focused.

Meeting hygiene:

Cancel any meeting that does not touch customers this week.
Replace status calls with a living doc. Owners, ETAs, customer-facing copy, and internal notes in one place.

5) Post a war room page and keep it current

People make mistakes when information hides in five tools.

Pin a single source of truth.

Courier delays and regional issues
Warehouse notices and cutoffs
Site incidents and cache clears
Promo rules and exclusions
Inventory flags
Macro tweaks and policy updates

Add patch notes. Two lines per change. The why and the new language. Agents should never learn updates from angry customers.

6) Give a simple exception matrix

Confusion burns energy quickly. A simple matrix speeds decisions and reduces escalations.

Refunds:

Wrong item: full or partial based on AOV and pick error rate
Damaged in transit: reship or refund based on inventory and urgency
Delivered not received: reship after carrier investigation or instant reship for VIPs
Missed delivery window: refund shipping and offer store credit

Replacements:

Always reship for loyalty tier X or higher
Always reship for SKUs on the never-late list
Always prioritize perishables or event-driven items

Upgrades:

Free shipping upgrade on service recovery tickets
Free sample or low-cost add-on where relevant and tasteful

Put the matrix in a one-pager. Train with a few live scenarios so the team sees the boundaries.

7) Train empathy that is fast and plain

Holiday stress sits on both sides of the screen. Scripts can sound robotic when emotions run hot. Use short lines that validate and then solve.

Acknowledge reality. I see the delay and the impact.
State the plan. I pushed a reship with priority and turned on SMS updates.
Close with certainty. I will stay on this until you confirm delivery.

Fast and kind beats fast and cold every single time. Fast and kind also drives better CSAT and fewer reopens.

8) Watch the right numbers and tie each spike to an action

Speed counts. So do reopens and intent shifts. Metrics need triggers, not dashboards for dashboard’s sake.

Track:

First response time, resolution time, CSAT, reopens
Tag volumes by day and by courier
Intent buckets for cancel and order edit
Save rates on delivery issue macros
Refund rate by agent and by tag
Auto resolution count from AI

Actions:

If delivered not received spikes on a specific carrier, publish a macro update and add a Help Center banner.
If address change volume jumps, add a short order edit note to order confirmation emails.
If chat queue rises above target, turn on a holding line that sets expectations and reduces double messages.
If refund rate spikes for a SKU, flag QA and pause ads for that SKU until the root cause is clear.

9) Keep the team connected to the impact

Meaning matters in Q4. Teams absorb frustration, so customers do not have to. The work lands better when the impact is visible.

Share wins in a daily thread. Pull in actual customer quotes.
Call out specific saves with context. The dollar value, the scenario, the action that worked.
Loop the team into product or ops fixes that came from their tags. Feedback that leads to change builds pride.

10) Run the recovery phase like a project

The work does not end on Cyber Monday. Recovery is a scheduled phase with owners and deadlines.

Stagger time off across the first two weeks of December
Lighter queues for agents who covered nights and weekends
A structured retro with three lists. What broke, what held, what to rebuild by February
A real celebration. Food, notes, shoutouts, time away from the inbox

People remember how a season ends. Ending strong pays dividends in retention and morale.