Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) is the most critical time of year for ecommerce, and the ultimate stress test for customer experience. It’s a multi-week marathon of promotions, pressure, and non-stop customer conversations.

Which begs the question: Is your AI customer service agent ready? And are you leveraging the latest AI strategies for ecommerce customer service to stay ahead?

If not, the risks go well beyond lost revenue. We’re talking higher cost to serve, frustrated customers, lower CSAT scores, and a reputation that’s hard to repair.

In this post, we’ll cover what BFCM really means from a CX lens, what’s at stake if you’re not prepared, and what your team should be doing now to get your AI agent in shape.

Understanding BFCM: The busiest time of year for your customer experience

BFCM is the peak shopping period that traditionally spans the Friday and Monday after American Thanksgiving. However, the shopping—and customer support needed—now spans across weeks, kicking off in mid-November and extending well into December.

For most brands, BFCM brings the year’s highest sales volume and service demand. As sales spike, so do customer questions, across every channel and every time zone, making AI support for holiday shopping mission-critical.

How enterprise brands manage high-volume support during BFCM

To keep up, many brands fall back on familiar strategies, like hiring seasonal agents, increasing SLAs, and adding basic chatbots to deflect volume.

But these solutions don’t scale well. Leading brands plan early, automate high-frequency questions with AI agents, and streamline escalations, building CX strategies that scale without sacrificing quality.

Why an AI agent is better than a chatbot for BFCM readiness

When pressure peaks, scripted bots fall short . AI customer service agents, by contrast, use large language models (LLMs), business logic, and real-time data to:

• Understand context and customer intent
• Personalize responses based on order history, channel, and behavior
• Integrate with backend systems to fetch or update data
• Handle follow-ups and multi-turn conversations across channels

Put simply: a chatbot can answer a question. An AI agent can resolve an issue.

What’s at stake if your AI customer service agent isn’t ready?

BFCM isn’t just busier, it’s riskier. As support volume surges and customer behavior gets more complex, your ability to deliver fast, reliable service becomes make-or-break. And without a strong AI agent in place, the cost of falling short compounds quickly.

Here are the five biggest risks of going into BFCM without a prepared AI customer service agent:

1. Missed conversions: If checkout fails—a broken promo code, unclear shipping—and help isn’t instant, the sale is lost.
2. Higher cost to serve: More tickets mean more agents, more escalations, and more pressure on budgets and teams.
3. Lost revenue: BFCM brings new customers. If support lags, they won’t stick around.
4. Lower CSAT: One poor interaction during BFCM can undo an otherwise successful sale.
5. Reputation risk: During peak season, bad support doesn’t stay quiet. It becomes part of your brand story.

What a strong BFCM customer service strategy looks like

The best customer service strategies don’t just react to pressure—they’re built to absorb it.

And during BFCM, “better” means faster, more personal, and far more scalable than most human teams can pull off on their own. If you want to keep pace with shoppers, protect both your margins and your reputation, your service strategy needs to be:

• Automated enough to resolve the obvious,
• Integrated enough to pull in real-time data,
• Flexible enough to adapt as shoppers’ needs evolve, and
• And smart enough to know when to bring in a human.

Automation is your pressure release valve

During BFCM 2024, Ada customers saw:

• 20% more chats opened
• 27% more engaged conversations
• 19% more agent handoffs

The brands that absorbed that volume most effectively did so by training their AI agents to handle high-frequency topics end-to-end, with promo code troubleshooting, shipping timelines, and order status inquiries.

With the right workflows and integrations, AI agents didn’t just lighten the load. They protected CSAT, improved resolution speed, and freed human agents to focus on higher-stakes conversations.

A top‑tier strategy blends AI for ecommerce customer service with seamless human‑agent escalation.

A static strategy won’t survive BFCM

Too often, customer support strategies treat BFCM like a single event. In reality, it’s a series of shifting demands. What customers need on November 21 looks very different from what they need on December 1 and beyond.

Here’s how priorities evolve:

• Pre-BFCM: Shoppers ask about shipping timelines, promo code and discount eligibility, and product comparisons.
• During BFCM: Inquiries are more centered on checkout issues, payment errors, and order tracking.
• Post-BFCM: The Focus is on shipping, returns, refunds, exchanges, and follow-ups.

If your AI agent isn’t tuned to anticipate and respond to those shifts, it’ll slow your customers down or escalate unnecessarily.

The most resilient CX strategies build AI agents that evolve with customer behavior, adapting their answers, tone, and priorities in real time, across every channel.

To improve performance, measure what matters

Volume only adds value if you’re tracking the right metrics, and during BFCM, visibility isn’t optional.

Here are the KPIs that should be front and center:

• Automated resolution rate: How much can your AI agent handle on its own?
• Time-to-resolution: How quickly are customers getting answers, not just first replies?
• Escalation rates: Are the right conversations making it to your human team?
• Cost-per-contact: Are you scaling efficiently?
• Support-driven conversion rates: Are AI interactions contributing to sales?
• CSAT: What’s the actual experience on the other side of the conversation?

Tracking the right metrics tells you what’s working, but it’s what you do next that sets you up to win.

Where to start: your pre-BFCM priorities

Once you’ve built your BFCM strategy, the next step is making sure your AI agent is set up to execute it—at scale, under pressure, and without surprises.

Here’s where high-performing brands focus first.

1. Equip your AI agent with context and content

Your agent is only as effective as the information it has access to. Now’s the time to update:

• Your agent’s persona to reflect peak-season goals, tone, and brand priorities.
• Your knowledge base with BFCM-specific articles, especially around promos, returns, shipping, and discount rules.
• Your greetings and proactive messages so customers are guided through common blockers before they even ask.

This is where most automation gaps show up—not in the logic, but in the language. Keep content accurate, up to date, and tailored to the moment.

2. Integrate with the systems your customers care about

During BFCM, customers don’t just want answers, they want action. That means your AI agent needs access to real-time data across:

• Order management systems (for tracking and status)
• Fulfillment platforms (for shipping timelines)
• Promo engines (for discount validation and exclusions)
• Inventory systems (for back-in-stock logic or low availability)

The more your agent can see, the more it can do. And the more it can do, the less pressure your human team feels.

3. Prioritize tasks with impact

Not everything needs to be done at once, but not everything can wait. Use a priority framework to tackle the highest-impact updates first:

• P0: Orders and returns, promo logic, live campaign support
• P1: Inventory availability, fallback systems, messaging across channels
• P2: Adjusted SLAs, coverage planning, and last-minute promo change plans

This approach helps you stay focused, align cross-functionally, and avoid reactive scrambles in the days before BFCM kicks off.

4. Plan for edge cases before they happen

BFCM is full of “what-ifs”: promo changes, system slowdowns, fulfillment issues, and surprise surges in traffic. Don’t wait for things to break.

• Add fallback messages to key pages like checkout and error states.
• Align escalation plans across CX, marketing, and operations.
• Use last year’s issues to build smarter failsafes.

5. Align your team behind the plan

AI customer service agents can only do their job if your people are looped in. Make sure everyone—from CX leadership to seasonal support—understands:

• What the agent can (and can’t) do
• How to escalate from AI to human
• Where to track metrics and performance
• Who owns what during BFCM, and how to share learnings after

Even the most powerful AI agent needs a well-aligned human team behind it to keep improving.

Make this BFCM your most prepared yet

BFCM is a moment of truth for your customer experience.

When pressure peaks and expectations skyrocket, the brands that win aren’t necessarily the ones offering the steepest discounts. They’re the ones delivering support that’s fast, reliable, and built to scale.

We’ve outlined what’s changing in customer behavior, what’s at stake if you’re unprepared, and how AI customer service agents can help you handle the volume without compromising experience.

Now it’s time to turn strategy into action and make sure your AI agent is ready for whatever this holiday season throws at you.