How Do You Manage Support During Federal Holidays?
January 27th was the Australia Day holiday in my part of the world — alternatively known as "Survival Day" for good reason. Holidays tied to beliefs and actions and customs from generations earlier can be complicated. Still, most of us appreciate a day off, even if it means, for example, celebrating the not-actual-birthday of a King who is still, inexplicably, your head of state.
A day off is a day off.
Unless it isn’t.
For many in customer support, a public holiday can be a day of work with little help, answering questions while your phone pings with photos of barbecues, family get-togethers*, pool parties, and sporting events.
“Missing you!”
Customers still need help during holidays; it’s the nature of support work. Help Scout’s own support team runs a voluntary system to make sure there are enough staff on hand to help. Being geographically distributed helps, as coverage can come from outside of the “zone of celebration” — another win for remote-first work. Diversity can help here too, as different days are more meaningful for different cultures or communities.
Here are a few methods you might use to decide who will be managing the support queue during a holiday:
Ask for volunteers, then roster: Let people choose to work if it suits them, and then fill any gaps by rotating through the team.
Strict roster: Everybody has a turn, and if you need to swap, it must be arranged through a manager.
Blatant bribery: Offer a higher rate of pay to people willing to take the shift. Increase the offer as necessary like an airline with an overbooked flight.
Use “special teams:” You may have people who take on holiday, weekend, or after-hours work as a contractual part of their job.
Curse of the gods: Have a team member who upsets a mythological figure and is cursed to perpetually be working on holidays, thereby freeing everyone else up. Highly effective but difficult to implement.
Split the work: If you have people covering time zones on either side of the holiday in question, you might be able to shift their hours to fill enough of the gap to get you through.
Points systems: Everybody needs to perform a certain amount of holiday work, and different holidays count for different amounts of “points earned” depending on their popularity.
Whichever system you choose, it must feel fair to all the participants. When it appears some people never have to work holidays or others always get stuck with them, it is disheartening and breeds discontent.
Apart from scheduling effectively, you can also work to reduce the incoming support load during a holiday.
Some ways to influence holiday queue volumes:
Plan your workload. In the same way that hospitals do not schedule elective procedures on weekends or holidays, shift support-creating work onto other days. For example, schedule product releases or marketing pushes away from those days.
Inform customers of reduced coverage. By telling customers through your support page and/or auto-response that you will have less capacity, you prepare them for a longer wait and may also encourage them to hold back non-urgent questions.
Simplify your support offering. You could switch off some channels like live chat or phone and offer only email support during holidays.
Emphasize self-service options. Help Scout’s Beacon, for example, allows you to switch modes to prioritize self-service over direct support contact. Perhaps you can trigger a “holiday mode” for your support pages.
Triage urgent issues. Some things need help right now, but others can be safely held back until more people are available. Keep your customers informed, and they will (mostly) be understanding.
Have an emergency option. Make sure there is a way to pull in extra help if it is truly necessary. A “not working but still on call” group is ideal.
Take a look at your 2025 calendar, and see if there is an opportunity to try something new for your holiday coverage.
* Many of us have family gatherings we’d be happy to have a reason to skip, so it’s not all bad.
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