The short answer
Festival query volume runs several times normal for a fortnight, and the questions are the most repetitive of the year - offer validity, delivery before the date, coupon stacking, returns on sale items. Writing one sale-terms document a week before the sale converts that surge from a staffing crisis into a retrieval problem, and deleting it afterwards stops the bot quoting expired offers in January.
Every festival sale has the same shape: marketing spends weeks preparing the offers, ops preps inventory - and support walks in on day one to find 300 unread messages. Query volume during Diwali week routinely runs several times normal, and it's the one time of year you can least afford slow answers, because every question has a cart behind it.
The useful thing about this surge, unlike most emergencies, is that you know the date. That makes it a preparation problem rather than a staffing one.
Why surge queries are the easiest to automate
Festival-week questions are the most repetitive of the year. Is the offer valid on this product? Will it arrive before Diwali? Can I combine coupons? Is COD available on a discounted order? Can I return something bought on sale? The same five or six questions, hundreds of times, from customers who are ready to pay.
That is precisely the profile an agent handles best - and precisely the profile a person handles worst, because answering the same sentence for the four-hundredth time at 11pm is where accuracy and patience both go. The only condition is that the answers exist in the knowledge base before the surge starts, which is the whole playbook below.
One week before: the document that does the work
Write a single sale-terms document. Not a section added to your existing policy - a separate file you can delete cleanly afterwards. It needs five things.
- Offer terms and validity, with explicit calendar dates. 'Valid until 12 November' beats 'valid till the festival', because the customer asking at 11pm on the 11th needs an answer, not a calculation.
- Coupon stacking rules, including the combinations that do not work. The negative cases generate more questions than the positive ones.
- Delivery timelines by region for the sale period, including the last order date for pre-festival delivery. This is the single most-asked question of the fortnight.
- The return window for sale items, especially if it differs from your normal policy. If sale items are exchange-only, say so in those words.
- COD availability and limits on discounted orders, since this is where carts stall for exactly the customers most sensitive to price.
Keep it to one topic per heading and every number as a digit - the same discipline that makes any document retrievable, covered in the knowledge-base guide.
A knowledge-base hour in October is worth a support-team week in November.
Then test like a suspicious customer
Spend twenty minutes trying to break it before your customers do. The questions that expose gaps are always the awkward ones.
Ask about combining two offers that cannot be combined. Ask about delivery to a city on your slow list, three days before the festival. Ask whether a sale item can be returned. Ask what happens if a gift arrives late. Ask about COD on an order below your usual minimum during the discount.
Every gap you find in that twenty minutes is a hundred escalations you will not receive during the sale, arriving at the exact moment you have least capacity to read them.
During the surge: watch gaps, not volume
Once the sale is live, total conversations is not a number that tells you anything - it goes up, that is the point, and the agent absorbs it rather than letting it turn into a backlog. The number that earns attention is the knowledge-gap list: the questions the agent could not answer.
Check it twice a day during the peak, which takes about four minutes. A gap appearing once is noise. A gap appearing forty times before lunch is a sentence you can add in five minutes that will answer the next several hundred customers instantly. That feedback loop is the difference between a surge that improves your knowledge base and one that just exhausts you.
The second thing to watch is what is reaching the escalation inbox. During a sale it should be disputes and delivery problems. If 'is the offer valid on this?' is still arriving there, that is a coverage gap wearing an escalation costume, and it is the cheapest thing you will fix all week.
What the surge does to a metered bill
One preparation that has nothing to do with documents: know what your support tooling will cost in the peak fortnight.
Per-conversation and per-resolution pricing produce their largest invoice in exactly the month you were already spending on ads and inventory. Worse, they create an incentive nobody admits to at the time - teams on metered plans have told us they hid the widget on high-traffic pages during a sale, or shortened the greeting so fewer people opened it. That is rationing support during the week support earns the most, and it is a pricing model producing a business decision. The cost arithmetic is here.
The morning after: delete the document
This is the step everyone skips, and it is the one that causes a support problem in January.
A grounded agent quotes your documents accurately. If the Diwali price sheet is still uploaded in February, it will cite it - confidently, correctly, and wrong. Grounding guarantees provenance, never freshness, which is why the sale-terms file should be a separate document you can delete in one action rather than a section tangled into your permanent policy.
Delete it, then do one more thing while it is fresh: save a copy outside the knowledge base as next year's template, with the gap list from this year's surge appended. Next October, preparation is editing a document rather than writing one, and the questions you failed to anticipate this year are already answered.
That is the whole point of a playbook. The surge stops being a crisis and becomes a checklist item - which is what it should have been all along. The Shopify setup guide covers the sale-season stress test from the storefront side.
Frequently asked questions
What should I upload before a festival sale?
One sale-terms document covering offer validity with explicit dates, coupon stacking rules, extended delivery timelines by region, the return window for sale items, and whether COD applies to discounted orders.
Why write dates explicitly instead of 'valid till the festival'?
Because customers ask on the last night. 'Valid until 12 November' is retrievable and unambiguous; 'valid till the festival' forces the customer to do arithmetic at 11pm, which they will not.
What should I watch during the surge?
Not total conversations - the agent absorbs those. Watch the knowledge-gap list. Each repeated gap is usually one missing sentence, and adding it answers the next hundred customers instantly.
What do I do after the sale ends?
Delete the sale-terms document the morning it expires. A grounded agent quotes your documents accurately, which means it will quote expired offers accurately too if you leave them uploaded.
