Hey everyone 👋

I’m Leanne and I’m one of the Senior Managers on the Customer Support team here at Intercom. 

For the past few years, I’ve been the driver of our End of Year Break coverage and workflow planning. During the holiday season, we want to ensure our Customer Support team get a well earned break to spend time with their family and friends, but we also have to ensure we’re still on hand to help our customers - some of whom will find that the end of the year is their busiest period of the year. 

We have a few strategies that we use to organise the right coverage for each day of the End of Year break, but we also use some of Intercom’s handy features to pre-empt some of the frequently asked questions we receive during this time of the year, and to set expectations with customers that we have a smaller team online so it might take a little longer for replies. 

When we get close to the December holiday season, we get a lot of questions from customers asking about how they can set their office hours to reflect any downtime they have. Because we know that this is our top asked question at this time of year, we use our Banners feature to answer the question before customers even need to write in to us. This will help us deflect any easily answered questions and help our customers with more complex questions get to our team quicker. 

We also set up a nifty Workflow especially for the holiday period which starts by setting expectations with our customers that we may be slower to respond during the period, then asking them if they’d like to take a look at our self-serve resources first, or proceed to chat with a member of the team. This is so useful for making sure our customers are clear that they might have a little bit longer to wait than usual, and also encourages them to self-serve first in case that helps them get the solution quicker. 

These are just a couple of really helpful tools you can use during any holiday / public holiday during the year. Give them a try and let us know how you get on!