Planning for the week your messaging volume triples

In a spike, the failure order is always the same: first reply time, then promises, then the number. The first two are capacity. The third is what happens when somebody decides to explain the delay to everybody at once.

A month before

1. Look at last year's shape, by hour. The peak is usually narrower and later in the day than people remember.
2. Write the answers now. The five questions the peak will bring - where is my order, are you open, can I change the address - answered well and saved.
3. Warm any new number up. A number added the week before a peak is a number at its most fragile at your busiest moment.
4. Decide what you will stop doing. Proactive outreach, campaigns, the newsletter. Peak week is not the week to add outbound volume.

A week before

• Set the expectation publicly. "We are busier than usual and replying within three hours" is a promise you can keep and it stops the follow-up messages that double your volume.
• Extend the auto-reply. Out of hours becomes most of the day; make it say something true.
• Brief everybody on the escalation path. In a spike, the cost of a wrong escalation is a queue, not a conversation.

During

Sort by oldest unanswered, not newest. In a spike the instinct is to clear the top of the list, which quietly abandons the people who have waited longest - and they are the ones about to write a review.

The broadcast temptation

Do not send an apology to your whole list. It is outbound volume from a number under stress, to people who mostly have not noticed a problem, and it converts a delay into an announcement. Answer the people who asked. If you must send to a list, segment it to the affected orders only.