The holiday season continues to be one of the busiest (and most profitable!) periods for global businesses. But higher call volumes, shifting schedules, and seasonal customer expectations can put pressure on your support and operations teams. For global businesses, this period is an opportunity to strengthen customer relationships, boost sales, and improve operational workflows. Preparing early helps ensure your teams stay aligned, customers reach the right department quickly, and no call goes unanswered during your busiest months.
Today’s holiday readiness plan should go beyond basic staffing and scheduling. With advanced call routing, AI-powered Call Insights, analytics, and backup call flows, Global Call Forwarding gives you the tools to keep your business reachable and resilient, no matter how busy the season gets.
Below are new, modernized ways to prepare your business for the holidays—rooted in both voice communication best practices and broader business readiness to help you maintain continuity and keep customers happy.
How to Make Your Business Holiday-Ready
The holidays often reshape how customers interact with your business. Call traffic becomes more unpredictable, teams juggle shifting schedules, and sales and support activities intensify—especially for companies operating across multiple regions and time zones. This is where proactive planning becomes essential. With the right mix of routing strategies, analytics, and operational readiness, you can deliver a smooth experience throughout the season.
Here are 7 ways to prepare your business for the holidays:
- Launch holiday marketing campaigns early
- Understand customer behavior before the rush
- Build holiday call flows with advanced routing
- Set up custom call reports and holiday-specific reports
- Prepare your customer service and sales teams
- Update your website, contact pages, and self-service options
- Handle internal operations before things get busy
1. Launch Holiday Marketing Campaigns Early
Your holiday communication strategy shouldn’t exist in silos—your email, social, paid ads, and voice channels all work together to drive seasonal engagement. By launching early, you give your campaigns time to build momentum while allowing your team to adjust based on performance and customer behavior. Use last year’s marketing and sales data and call analytics to anticipate demand trends and tailor your messaging by region.
Holiday marketing should be aligned across email, social, paid ads, and voice channels. Prepare:
- Holiday content marketing — Put out relevant content for your customers about how they might use your product or service during the holidays (knowledge base, how-to guides, etc.). Holiday landing pages optimized for local regions
- Holiday promotions — Run special offers and deals for the holidays to bring in more customers. Use past years’ call and customer data to refine campaigns and run more targeted promotions.
- Updated company contact information — Reassure existing customers that your business will be reachable during the holidays and provide them with resources for off-hours assistance (chatbots, online ticketing and support center, etc.)
- Business phone system — IVR updates that highlight holiday offers, CRM tagging for holiday-related inbound calls.
- Overall clear messaging around shipping times, appointment availability, or service hours.
Plan your holiday marketing strategy to keep customers happy and maintain business continuity during the holidays. Launching early also ensures your teams have time to monitor performance and optimize campaigns throughout the season.
2. Understand Customer Behavior Before the Rush
Holiday demand isn’t just about higher call volumes; it’s about understanding what customers actually want during your busiest months. The more visibility you have into their needs, pain points, and expectations, the better you can prepare your routing, staffing, and messaging.
With AI Call Insights from Global Call Forwarding, you can identify:
- Common issues customers called about last year
- Sentiment shifts across regions or product lines
- Where call flows caused delays or frustration
- Agent performance trends to guide staffing
With transcript search, call summaries, and sentiment scoring, you can quickly surface patterns and adjust your support strategy before the season starts.
Beyond AI Call Insights, you can also use:
- Custom call reports and analytics — Review missed-call trends, length of calls, regional spikes, and number tags to understand where demand came from and when. This helps you determine which hours, departments, or markets may need additional coverage during the holidays.
- Customer feedback and frontline input — Your support agents hear real concerns daily. Use surveys, ticket tags, QA reviews, and agent feedback sessions to uncover seasonal issues, common product questions, and recurring friction points. This qualitative insight often reveals gaps that your data alone may not capture.
Together, AI-driven analysis, historical reports, and real customer feedback provide a full picture of how customer behavior changes during the holiday season so you can prepare proactively instead of reacting in the moment.
3. Build Holiday Call Flows With Advanced Routing
Holiday traffic is rarely predictable, but your phone system can be. Use holiday call routing and time-based routing to pre-define exactly what happens to your calls on specific days, weekends, or alternate support hours. This lets you:
- Route calls to backup teams, after-hours agents, or on-call schedules
- Play seasonal greetings or custom holiday announcements
- Send overflow calls to voicemail, a secondary number, or an emergency call center
- Shift routing by region to manage spikes in different regions like APAC, EMEA, or the Americas.
You can also create backup call flows, so if your primary team is unavailable, calls automatically roll over to the next best destination, ensuring callers never hit a dead end.
Your business might have specific holiday schedules not just during the holiday season but throughout the year. It could be employees taking vacation and time off, or your whole business taking a day or two off for national and public holidays. So you can create these types of schedules for the next year as well.
How do I set up holiday call routing? Check out our guide on how to set up holiday routing with Global Call Forwarding.
4. Set Up Custom Reports and Holiday-Specific Reports
During the holiday season, call patterns shift dramatically. Certain regions spike earlier than others, support queues get longer, and customer needs become more urgent. A regular reporting cadence isn’t enough. You need holiday-specific call reports that highlight short-term trends, compare year-over-year performance, and help your teams react quickly to seasonal fluctuations.
Your call data can help you predict, plan, and measure holiday performance, but only if you can see it clearly.
Use our Custom Reports feature and generate or schedule exports to:
- Track peak call times across global regions
- Review missed call patterns to see where coverage needs improvement
- Compare this year’s call volume to last year’s
- Measure campaign performance by phone line, number tag, or region
- Send automated weekly reports to team leads.
You can create dedicated call reports just for November–January activity, filter by promotional dates, or track performance during extended hours and weekend shifts. These insights help you see how holiday traffic differs from the rest of the year and give your teams the data they need to make fast, informed decisions.
With these holiday-specific reports, you’re not just monitoring performance, you’re anticipating it. This ensures you have the staffing, routing, and backup flows needed to stay ahead of customer demand during the busiest time of the year.
5. Prepare Your Customer Service & Sales Teams
As holiday demand ramps up, your frontline teams become the core of your customer experience. Even a small surge in inquiries can overwhelm unprepared departments, so giving your agents the right tools and information ahead of time is crucial. Start by reviewing last year’s call patterns to anticipate peak days and regions, then align staffing and workflows accordingly. This helps reduce stress on your team and shortens customer wait times.
Whether you use seasonal staffing or shift adjustments, holiday readiness should include:
- Flexible scheduling for high-traffic days
- Training refreshers for new and existing agents
- Updated call scripts, FAQ responses, and escalation rules
- Failover strategies if a region experiences outages or high volume
Bonus: Use call transcripts and summaries from past years to train new seasonal hires on real customer scenarios, helping them ramp up faster and deliver consistent support from day one.
6. Update Your Website, Contact Pages, and Self-Service Options
During the holidays, customers look for quick answers, often before they even pick up the phone. Ensuring your digital touchpoints are clear, accurate, and up-to-date helps reduce unnecessary call traffic and improves the overall experience. Review every customer-facing page for seasonal changes and make sure your website can handle increased traffic from campaigns and promotions.
Many customers try self-service first, especially during the holidays. Make sure:
- Contact pages list accurate hours, holiday closures, and phone lines
- IVR menus match what’s shown online
- Support documentation and chat widgets reflect seasonal changes
- Your checkout, pricing, and product pages load quickly
- Local numbers for regions like APAC, EMEA, and LATAM are easy to find.
This reduces unnecessary call volume and improves conversions while keeping your support queues more manageable.
7. Handle Internal Operations Before Things Get Busy
The operational side of holiday preparation is just as important as customer-facing work. With multiple teams juggling PTO, increased workloads, and year-end tasks, aligning internal processes early keeps everyone organized. Audit your systems, technology stack, and workflows to ensure everything runs smoothly, even when demand spikes.
Outside of communications, make sure your business is operationally ready:
- Finalize vacation and PTO schedules. so teams know who’s on duty
- Audit your inventory, supply chain, or delivery timelines
- Perform a year-end systems cleanup: permissions, roles, user seats
- Ensure billing, invoicing, and accounting workflows can handle seasonal spikes
- Check integrations (CRM, helpdesk, UCaaS) so agents aren’t slowed down
A well-organized backend keeps customer experience smooth on the front end and minimizes disruptions during your busiest period.
Getting in the Holiday Spirit
As you prepare your business for the holidays, don’t forget to get into the holiday spirit and celebrate with your teams, in whatever capacity is appropriate. This is a time to take a step back after weeks of preparing and be present in the moment.
Need a call routing solution for the upcoming holiday season? Chat with our representatives online or call us at +1 (561) 908-6171. Happy holidays!
