Data and feedback: Your strategic allies

Congratulations, you have officially managed to survive the 2025 customer service holiday season! But guess what? The work is not truly done; you need to start thinking ahead this year to make sure each key lesson brings valuable insights that can be put into action. If you haven’t done this before, let this year set new rules.

Start with a simple objective: 2026 needs to be better than last year, and the best way for you to achieve it is to take a look at what went well and wrong during 2025’s customer service rush. We have great news for you: You have everything you need to achieve it! If you don’t believe us, we have 2 hints: feedback and data. 

Transform your customer interactions and their feedback into valuable insights that drive your strategies. This is the best way to ensure your previous successes and lessons learned become your top growth drivers. Now, let’s discuss some of the lessons we learned during the holiday customer service season.

What the holiday customer service rush actually reveals

The biggest takeaway from the 2025 Holiday season was about the importance of intentional design and how often it can be left aside, leading to huge mistakes. All the customer service rush forced us to clarify some uncomfortable, yet eye-opening questions: 

• Are operations truly scale-proof and able to grow without breaking?
• Are CX principles well defined, with clear ownership, roles, and decision paths?
• Are expectations realistic or set upstream without operational validity?
• Are partnerships mature and well-designed, with shared success criteria, established review cadences, agreed signals, and clear escalation paths before pressure hits
• Is data being shared early and consistently or late and fragmented? Resulting in slow action.

All these questions are meant to face you with some hard truths that are not always brought to the table by support teams or other departments. They feel their customer data is enough to reveal what went well or wrong without questioning the internal operations. Sometimes, taking a look at the current workflows or systems provides more insights than people think. 

We learned the importance of teams being aligned to move quickly and adapt when volume increases, ensuring superb coordination that increases customer satisfaction. This mindset change is very powerful when you start planning ahead of the peak season, allowing your teams to view challenges as learning opportunities. 

Even though this increases the ownership for support and operations teams, it ensures customer relationships stay strong over time and helps you prevent CX issues. Results may not always be what you expected, but they always provide valuable lessons that will help you improve.

Customer service during the holidays: The expectations vs the outcomes

Before we started this holiday customer service season, there were some expectations we had very clear:

• Sustained volume spikes driven by extended promotional windows. An extended need for customer support beyond holidays due to promotions spans becoming longer, which will require sharper hiring and training for support roles.
• Less customer patience for delays or friction. In the fast-paced world we live in, customers become less patient when it comes to orders or fragmented experiences. People expect fast solutions and for their lives to become easier when reaching out to you, so we knew we had to work on encouraging proactive support and becoming efficient without leaving quality aside. 
• Increased AI and automation leverage. Many industry trends highlighted a potential increase in AI and automation for customer support during 2025, eliminating the high demand for human agents. Believing cost-savings were ensured without having to sacrifice existing teams and eliminating the need to scale up, saving time from deploying a winning team.

While the first two played out exactly as anticipated, AI showed up differently than most thought. Instead of eliminating the demand for human support, AI refined it by absorbing repeatable interactions. This, however, brought a new need: Human agents have to handle higher-context, higher-emotion conversations, and AI should be used for optimizing agents’ work. 

That opens up room for conversations and debates on whether AI must be a part of every customer support team. Teams that understand how AI can help them become more efficient use it for: 

• Streamlining repetitive tasks. Tasks that take much longer than they should can easily be performed by AI, especially those that can be automated, like data entry, identifying trends from metrics, analyzing interactions to provide real-time insights, etc.  
• Handling large volumes of inquiries. Whenever teams are faced with a high volume of cases, they can ask AI to identify patterns and trends from those issues to escalate them to the appropriate agents. They can also send updates for each case, taking out the uncertainty for the customer.
• Providing instant resolution for routine issues. By identifying the most common questions and issues customers have, teams can train AI bots to take care of those cases. They can provide scripts to program different answers, or they can connect the bot to knowledge bases so they can share self-service guides. This saves valuable time for agents so they can focus on complex cases instead.
• Augmenting human performance. By freeing people’s time, automating tasks, or providing real-time feedback/insights from customer interactions, AI can act as a valuable partner to increase satisfaction.

Basically, AI is your top choice when it comes to fast solutions, helping in specific cases. The speed improvement was not only observed by us, according to Liveops 2025 Holiday AI & Customer Service Report, 85 % of respondents stated that it improved their holiday experience. 

Now, let’s review some cases for which human support remained essential:

• Higher-context inquiries, where nuance, creativity, and experience matter. Humans can combine their emotions and expertise to analyze the situation, coming up with an answer that connects with the customer.
• Emotionally charged issues, where customers need to feel understood. Active listening is more important than stating cold facts; customers are not looking for hard truths, but for emotional understanding. 
• High-value interactions, where empathy, trust, relationship building, and judgment are critical. While AI excels at analyzing objective situations, humans can bring a subjective opinion that might add more value to the customer.

So human support is relevant when empathy needs to drive the interaction, and in cases where emotions are at stake.

The result was not fewer conversations, but more complex ones. HubSpot and SurveyMonkey reports revealed that 82% of customers prefer human support, even if the wait time stays the same.  What does this mean for AI in customer support? It means the winning formula is having humans and technology join forces to offer a great experience. 

Human empathy shows people that emotions are important and that agents want to understand their emotions to find the best solution. AI brings efficiency to that sensitive process by providing instant feedback and insights that help the team find a fast yet personalized solution.

That shift elevated the importance of skilled agents, strong training, and real-time operational signals, with QA and NPS serving as early validation of how rising complexity was landing with customers, not just whether SLAs were met.

The challenges we encountered with the 2025 holiday support season

No one ever truly expects things to go smoothly, especially in business outcomes. Preparing for potential events and trends is what successful teams do, and when it comes to peak season, overthinking saves your life. Some challenges can be predicted, but others require you to adapt at the moment. These are the challenges we saw and how we plan to overcome them for this year: 

Complexity over volume

Ticket counts mattered less than the effort and judgment required to solve those tickets. Each case needs to be treated individually, even when you have technology that can solve them immediately, as each ticket tells a story. The story includes people affected, emotions flowing, and a need for empathy. When facing identical tickets in peak seasons, the outcomes depend on issue mix, emotional intensity, and cross-functional dependencies.

What we will be doing differently: Changing the mindset to tackle emotional complexity instead of volume as the primary operational constraint. This exposes the limits of planning just in volumes, resulting in companies treating tickets as stats instead of reinforcing the need to design holiday customer service around complexity, not just scale. 

Expectation alignment

Making sure the expectations stay grounded while customers’ needs evolve every day is becoming one of the most stressful aspects for companies. When CX promises moved faster than operational reality, whether due to aggressive promotions, inventory miscalculations, or fulfillment constraints, support absorbed the gap.

What we will be doing differently: Consider that high-emotion, high-effort interactions increase both volume and complexity. Requiring better training for agents, hiring technology to optimize results, and clearly stating the needs on SLAs and contracts. 

Speed to action

In peak moments, timely signals beat perfect data, this is where being able to adapt becomes a key skill. Waiting for perfect data to be introduced results in unacceptable latency, more so when early signals prove to offer enough directional confidence to move. 

What we will be doing differently: We need to start prioritizing fast and easy-to-interpret indicators, such as shifts in issue mix, effort, or sentiment, over fully validated reports. This can be flagged by implementing AI in the mix, as they can spot trends or warning signals at the moment.

The importance of high-performing teams

2025 was not a year mandated by urgency, instead it was a year of coordination and discipline while under pressure and high volume. High-performing teams focused on optimizing their systems while they were under stress. The thought process is due to pressure always being a part of the holiday customer service rush. The change in discipline tries to make pressure more manageable instead of trying to reduce it unsuccessfully.

That discipline showed up in four very specific ways:

Shifting from exhaustive reporting to actionable signals

During peak season, exhaustive reporting became a liability. Teams that waited for complete, fully validated dashboards were always behind what customers were experiencing in real time. Instead, strong teams shifted their focus to leading indicators that could be interpreted quickly and acted on immediately.

That meant paying closer attention to:

• Sudden changes in issue mix rather than total volume
• Finding satisfying answers to tickets instead of just closing them
• Early sentiment shifts showing frustration, confusion, or repeated contact

Prioritizing operating discipline over urgency

Under pressure, discipline creates speed when:

• There’s no confusion about who acts (Clear agent expertise)
• No debate arises about decision rights (Defined hierarchy and authority)
• There’s no lag caused by unclear escalation paths (Easy to understand escalation)

This approach matters because holiday customer service issues rarely arrive clearly categorized. They surface as messy, contextual situations that don’t wait for perfect reporting. People need answers, even if they are not perfect, uncertainty is way more frustrating than knowing you need to wait a bit while the team finds the best solution.

Shortening decision cycles

High-performing teams reduced the time between signal and action by:

• Pre-defining what good data looked like in peak
• Agreeing upfront on which signals justify intervention
• Empowering leaders and frontline managers to act without escalation for every deviation

Decisions need to be made in shorter cycles instead of waiting for weekly or post-mortem reviews. If your team waits for the “perfect” moment to act, you will lose the customer, and their frustration will become a public complaint. Acting fast allows teams to adjust staffing, messaging, workflows, or escalation paths while customers are still feeling the impact, not after.

Defining clear ownership and escalation thresholds

Clarity around ownership proves to be critical. When you have a mature operation and partnership, there is no ambiguity about:

• Who makes a decision?
• When an issue crosses from monitoring to escalation
• Which teams need to be involved at each threshold

Escalation paths need to be defined ahead of time and based on signals, not relationships. That distinction matters. Teams that rely on personal connections or informal workarounds lose time when pressure is highest. Peak season didn’t change how strong teams operate; it validated why they operate that way.

Key lessons learned from the 2025 customer service holiday season

The strongest outcomes came from programs where success was clearly defined upfront, operating rhythms were tight, and ownership was shared across teams. When volume and urgency increased, those fundamentals mattered more than any individual tool or headcount decision.

It’s tempting to blame staffing limitations or tool inefficiencies during peak holiday time customer service, but those are not the true reasons behind the issues. When in reality, success is correlated more strongly with:

1. Clear definitions before peak season

Teams that performed well entered the season with shared clarity around success criteria, ownership, and expectations. Roles and decision rights were understood way before the peak season started. This helps team members understand who to reach out to if there’s an issue, making it easier to optimize at the moment.

2. Tight operating workflows

Operating rhythms were about better signals, how to spot those signals fast, and how to interpret them to adjust to customer needs more efficiently. High-performing teams rely on regular reviews focused on leading indicators with enough context to act.

3. Shared ownership across teams rather than silos

Strong outcomes consistently showed up where ownership crossed functional boundaries. Ownership needs to be defined for every team, not just support; if not, customer service agents are wrongly accused of issues that go deeper and are beyond their control. CX’s results don’t depend on the CX team's performance only; the whole company needs to own the results.

4. Coaching and decision quality matter more than speed alone

As AI removes low-complexity work, agents are left with conversations driven by emotions that require their expertise. Teams that invest in coaching and decision quality handle this shift more effectively. When resolving customer issues during the holiday season, speed is not the main goal, but rather to make the customer feel understood and satisfied with the answer. Training should focus on how to interpret customer feedback and how to develop the skill of "reading between the lines" to act immediately.

5. Reporting becomes a liability when it slows down action

During peak season, waiting for well-explained data often introduces more risk than acting on early signals. Teams need to start seeing insights as tools that help you understand context and not as the context itself; if not, they will move slowly, creating instability through the customer service holiday period. Here's where AI can also be valuable, by providing real-time insights of queries and common trends spotted amongst their requests.

Customer support trends shaping the 2026 holiday season

Based on what we learned during 2025 and what we believe customer experience is headed, several customer support trends are becoming clear for 2026. Some of the most important trends we believe are going to take the spotlight during this year are:

Complexity-aware CX becomes table stakes

Planning will move beyond volume and SLAs toward effort, intent, and resolution difficulty. Teams need to understand that peak season stress will always be a part of the holidays, so instead of trying to control the uncontrollable, they should focus on understanding the issues’ complexity. 

AI settles into an operator role

AI will augment frontline teams through context, prediction, and decision support, while human judgment remains the differentiating factor. Reports say that 55% of cases had to be escalated to a human, and 45% had stated that AI failed to understand a customer problem. So, AI should not be the main focus, instead it needs to be seen as the best assistant for support agents.

Expectation alignment becomes measurable

Marketing promises, fulfillment realities, and support capacity will increasingly be managed against shared CX outcomes. CX needs to be treated as a company-wide effort instead of only the Support agents' responsibility.

Speed becomes a design principle

Faster signals, clearer ownership, and quicker decisions will matter more than perfect data. All this comes from valuable and thoroughly thought-out training sessions. Technology takes care of speed with humans supervising it.

2026 will favor organizations that design for clarity and adaptability before pressure hits, not while it’s already there. That means designing workflows around real customer intent, training teams to make better decisions in ambiguity, and building operating rhythms that surface pressure early.

Again, this comes from treating CX as a company-wide strategy, because hiring and talent acquisition teams need to analyze the prospect's profiles and spot skills that will be valuable for the holiday season and beyond. People who have developed critical thinking are more valuable than ever, support is not only about solving tickets anymore, it is a critical role that helps spot customer needs that would be otherwise ignored.

Operational efficiency still matters, but only when it’s paired with clear ownership, clear escalation paths, and shared accountability for customer outcomes. Even though tools help,  well-designed systems are what hold everything in its right place for a smooth holiday season.

How should you prepare for the next Holiday season

The best way to succeed is to try new things, and we get that it can be scary to navigate through uncertainty, but sometimes you need to do new things to discover what works. We encourage you to start planning ahead of time for this year’s holiday season, and don’t wait for perfect data this time.

Collect feedback and insights from this previous peak season and start analyzing what needs to be improved and what doesn’t need to evolve much. Your top priorities should be: creating a collaborative environment between CX and other departments, determining responsibilities, and creating personalized training sessions.

At Horatio, we believe that holiday seasons should not be too much of a headache when you have a great team in charge. Let us help you create a winning strategy, contact us and let’s start working together!

FAQs

1. Why is the holiday season such a critical test for customer service operations?

The holiday season is such a critical test for customer service operations because it exposes whether customer service operations, decision paths, and partnerships are built to scale under pressure. What works in a steady state is tested hard when volume and urgency rise at the same time.

1. What was the biggest takeaway from the 2025 holiday customer service season?

The biggest takeaway wasn’t about readiness gaps or headcount. It was about intentional design. Teams that performed best had clear success definitions, tight operating rhythms, and shared ownership across teams. When pressure increased, those fundamentals mattered more than any individual tool or staffing decision.

1. What role did AI actually play during the 2025 holiday season?

AI improved speed and absorbed low-complexity, repeatable work, but it didn’t eliminate the need for human support. Agents handled fewer simple issues and more high-context, emotionally charged conversations, which increased the importance of judgment, coaching, and real-time operational insight.

1. Why did operating discipline matter more than urgency?

Operating discipline creates speed. Teams with clear ownership, defined decision rights, and pre-established escalation paths were able to act quickly without debate.

1. What customer support trends will shape the 2026 holiday season?

The 2026 holiday season will favor complexity-aware customer experience, where planning accounts for effort and intent, not just volume. AI will continue to augment human performance rather than replace it.