From growth to goals: Scaling e-commerce customer service the right way

E-commerce businesses experience highly dynamic traffic patterns, with growth and seasonal peaks that can make or break customer experience. 

Black Friday, Christmas, and major sales campaigns require not only more hands-on deck but also smart planning, flexible operations, and technology that supports both agents and customers. 

Based on industry practice, here are proven ways to scale customer service effectively while ensuring business goals are met. 

 

Plan resources early

 

Accurate forecasting is the foundation of scalable customer service. The process starts with analyzing historical contact volumes and the expected impact of planned promotional activities on traffic. Advanced forecasting models — increasingly powered by artificial intelligence — can predict demand with high granularity, breaking it down by day, hour, or even 15-minute intervals in large-scale operations, and by contact channel or queue. 

On this basis, combined with data such as Average Handling Time (AHT), companies can precisely calculate required resources in RBH (required working hours). Many organizations define their RBH needs as early as six months in advance, which allows training programs to be scheduled well ahead of the peak season, typically beginning in August or September. 

A common challenge is the gap between forecasted RBH and actual demand. Flexible workforce planning helps bridge this difference — for example, by engaging students or part-time staff who can adjust their schedules as needed. AI-driven workforce management tools further support this process by continuously aligning staffing levels with real demand. 

 

Adapt training to the scale of operations

Training should be aligned not only with the scale of operations but also with the specific topics customers are most likely to call about. For example, in e-commerce, the pre-holiday season typically brings a surge of inquiries related to orders, while the post-holiday period often sees an increase in complaints and returns. Planning training programs around these patterns helps prepare agents for the issues they will most frequently encounter. 

During peak periods, the scope of training is often narrowed so that new hires can quickly become operational by focusing on simple, high-volume tasks. At the same time, experienced agents handle more complex cases. 

Another key area is training validation through knowledge tests — each training module should be concluded with a test to ensure that consultants have absorbed the material.  

It’s important to remember that ineffective training not only lowers service quality but also creates significant stress for agents who haven’t mastered the material — often leading to high absenteeism or turnover. 

It is equally important to draw lessons from previous seasons. Tools like Boromir — which analyzes agents’ support requests — and Gutenberg — which provides instant access to project information — help identify knowledge gaps by highlighting the topics that generate the most questions. This makes it easier to refine and expand future training.  

Well-planned and validated training not only safeguards service quality but also reduces stress among agents. Poorly prepared employees face greater difficulties during peak loads, which often leads to higher absenteeism and staff turnover. 

 

Use chatbots and voicebots for repetitive inquiries

Scaling doesn’t always mean adding more people. Many inquiries are repetitive — questions about order status, product availability, shipping, or returns. If all of these reach human agents, capacity is quickly consumed, especially during peaks. 

AI-powered chatbots and voicebots can automate simple, high-volume requests by: 

• providing instant, 24/7 responses across phone, chat, and messaging channels, 

• freeing human agents to focus on complex, value-added tasks, 

• reducing waiting times for customers, 

• lowering operational costs. 

Beyond these direct benefits, there is also a strategic advantage. In e-commerce (and not only there), maximizing sales is often the top priority. By routing routine, informational inquiries to bots, agents can dedicate more time to order-related conversations and revenue-driving interactions. This ensures that the human team focuses where it matters most — on activities that directly support business growth. 

Tools like Primebot, an AI-based voicebot and chatbot solution, are designed to support both inbound and outbound communication. They can answer product or shipping questions, confirm orders, or run post-sale surveys. During peak campaigns, such technology can be deployed in just a few days, ensuring service quality even when volumes surge. 

 

Diversify locations and enable remote work

Having more than one operational center makes scaling much faster — both from a recruitment and facilities perspective. 

Distributing projects across multiple sites also requires maintaining consistent knowledge in each location. This can be done through backup teams or experienced staff dedicated to specific processes, ensuring continuity and making scale-ups easier to manage. 

Remote work is another important lever. Often offered as a benefit for experienced agents, it saves commuting time and costs, which is especially attractive at a time when many companies are calling employees back to offices. It also plays a crucial role in scaling multilingual or highly specialized projects, where the available talent pool is limited and even multiple offices may not provide enough capacity.

In such cases, training must also be adapted to remote delivery. This requires extra attention to program design and execution, so that trainers can be confident agents stay focused, absorb the material at the right pace, and are fully prepared to deliver quality service. 

 

Build a multiskilled team

Scaling e-commerce customer service isn’t only about adding headcount — it’s about using available resources as efficiently as possible. This is where multiskilled teams bring a real advantage. However, this is only feasible if contact routing can be easily segmented, which is not always the case. That’s why such decisions should always be preceded by a thorough analysis of technical capabilities. 

When building multiskilled teams, a step-by-step approach works best — training agents in one skill, letting them gain practical experience, and only then moving on to the next area. 

Instead of dividing agents into narrow roles (e.g., only inbound or only outbound), multiskilled agents can: 

• switch seamlessly between different channels such as phone, email, chat, or social media, 

• handle both inbound queries and outbound tasks like sales follow-ups or delivery confirmations, 

• adapt quickly when traffic shifts from one channel to another, maintaining service levels across the board. If it’s possible to structure the team so that agents handle multiple communication channels, agent productivity increases — understood as actual handling time. This is partly because there’s no idle waiting time for calls or chats; instead, during those moments the agent can work on emails, which can be completed between real-time interactions. 

This flexibility reduces idle time and makes scheduling easier. During quieter periods on one channel, the same agents can support other tasks, ensuring consistent productivity. 

A multiskilled workforce also improves business resilience. If a sudden campaign drives traffic to chat, or a system issue triggers more phone calls, agents trained across multiple channels can absorb the spike without service delays. For managers, this means fewer bottlenecks and less dependency on large, single-skilled teams that are harder to reorganize. 

For e-commerce companies, multiskilling also supports customer experience consistency. Shoppers interact with the same knowledgeable advisors regardless of the channel, which builds trust and reduces friction in the buying journey. 

 

Leverage advanced technology for efficiency 

Technology plays a critical role in scaling customer service, as demonstrated above by two of Axendi’s proprietary tools.

Internal AI assistants, such as Gutenberg, provide agents with instant access to information from multiple databases. This reduces search time, improves response time, and supports accuracy, while lightening the load on team leaders. 

Performance monitoring tools such as Boromir further strengthen onboarding and day-to-day operations. Fully integrated with Microsoft 365, Agner enables real-time tracking of team activity across all communication channels. 

Its analytics cover post volumes, question patterns, response times, peak activity, and agent efficiency. With such insights, managers can: 

• monitor effectiveness in real time, 

• identify recurring issues and deliver targeted training, 

• optimize response times and improve satisfaction, 

• balance workloads to reduce costs, 

• speed up onboarding with data-driven guidance. 

 

Outsourcing vs. in-house scaling

 

When e-commerce businesses prepare for seasonal peaks, they often face a choice: scale the service function internally or partner with an outsourcing provider. Each approach has its implications. 

In-house scaling usually might involve: 

• higher recruitment costs and team maintenance expenses during downtime, 

• lengthy onboarding and training processes, 

• limited flexibility due to corporate structures or approval chains, 

• infrastructure strain when additional workstations, licenses, or IT support are needed. 

An important benefit is also the transfer of responsibility for results to the external provider — including the consequences of not meeting agreed KPIs, for example through the commonly used bonus-malus system. 

For organizations with rigid corporate rules, compliance procedures, or budget restrictions, scaling internally can become a slow and expensive process — one that doesn’t always match the speed and unpredictability of e-commerce traffic. 

Outsourced contact centers, on the other hand, are designed for flexibility. They provide: 

• a ready workforce that can be scaled up or down quickly, 

• multilingual support to handle diverse customer bases, 

• established HR and training processes to accelerate onboarding, 

• advanced technologies (voicebots, chatbots, analytics platforms) available out of the box. 

This means businesses can adapt to sudden peaks without overhauling their internal operations or carrying long-term overhead once the demand subsides. 

For many online retailers, outsourcing is not just an option — it is the smarter way to scale. It provides speed, efficiency, and predictability.

 

Scaling with balance

Scaling e-commerce customer service isn’t just about adding more staff. It requires a balance of early planning, flexible scheduling, automation with chatbots and voicebots, multiskilling, and operational agility. 

When these elements are in place, businesses can handle peak demand efficiently, protect service quality, and achieve their objectives, even during the busiest periods of the year.