Planning your contact centre for Christmas
Christmas isn’t just another peak
Most peaks are a single shape — volume rises, you cover it, volume falls. Christmas is half a dozen distinct operational events stitched together across six weeks, each with its own forecast, its own staffing answer, and its own risks. A single “Christmas plan” that treats it as one peak almost always under-covers some sections and over-covers others. The operations that handle it well break Christmas down into its components and plan each one explicitly.
The six operational events inside “Christmas”
1. The pre-Christmas spike (mid-November to mid-December). Volume builds through Black Friday and Cyber Monday, then accumulates into the two weeks before Christmas Day. Contact reasons are heavily weighted to delivery enquiries, order amends, gifting, payment, and pre-purchase questions. Average handle time often runs longer than usual because contacts are higher-stakes for the customer (a Christmas gift that doesn’t arrive isn’t just any parcel).
2. The Christmas Eve collapse. Volume drops sharply on Christmas Eve afternoon. By 4pm most customers have given up on anything that wasn’t already going to happen for Christmas. Operations that staff Christmas Eve at full strength often see embarrassing idle time; operations that under-staff a 10am surge of last-minute enquiries get caught out. The trick is shaping coverage to the curve, not flat-line staffing the day.
3. The closed days (Christmas Day, Boxing Day, sometimes 27th). Even fully closed contact centres usually have on-call cover, security and fraud monitoring, and any emergency lines that need to remain open. The planning question is who’s on call and how they’re paid, not how many seats are filled.
4. The Boxing Day and twixmas surge. Returns. “Why hasn’t it arrived?” Account problems. Gift-card activation. New device set-up. The week between Christmas and New Year often produces a separate volume peak in its own right — not as high as pre-Christmas, but high relative to a thinly-staffed operation running on volunteers. Some operations see twixmas volumes higher than any other week of the year.
5. New Year’s Day and the first working week of the year. Heavy renewals, account enquiries, and (in financial services particularly) a wave of customers who’ve thought about their finances over the break. The first working week of January is often the biggest week of the year for many B2C operations.
6. The returns and complaints wave (early January through end of January). Anything that went wrong during December surfaces here — the lost parcel, the wrong size, the gift that didn’t fit, the broken item. This is a separate operational event with a different contact-reason profile, often more complaint-handling capacity needed and longer AHT.
Six events. Six forecasts. Six staffing answers. Treating them as one peak is the single most common planning failure at Christmas.
The day-of-week effect — Christmas 2026
The position of Christmas Day in the week changes the operational pattern materially. Christmas Day 2026 falls on a Friday. Boxing Day is Saturday. New Year’s Day 2027 is Friday. The substitute bank holiday for Boxing Day (when it falls on a weekend) is typically Monday 28 December in the UK.
This combination has specific operational consequences:
The pre-Christmas final push lands on a Thursday. Customers have one more business day than usual after the Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday rush. Thursday 24 December is the “last day to phone” for most cohorts. Volume is heavily front-loaded into the morning.
The closed block is long. Friday 25, Saturday 26, Sunday 27, Monday 28 (substitute holiday) creates a four-day continuous closure for most non-emergency operations. The twixmas pent-up demand hits Tuesday 29 December — expect that day to behave like a heavy Monday morning, with all four days’ worth of suppressed volume landing inside 24 hours.
New Year repeats the pattern. Friday 1 January 2027 closed; Saturday 2 January closed in most operations; Monday 4 January is a heavy first-day-back, but it’s also when many enterprise customers come back online and trigger their own renewal and review activity.
If you plan for “a normal Christmas” without checking which day of the week each date falls on, you will mis-staff somewhere. Tuesday 29 December 2026 is the day to plan for — the only-just-back day with four days of suppressed contact behind it.
The planning levers worth pulling now
Eight concrete actions worth completing by the end of August.
1. Forecast the six events separately. Don’t roll Christmas up into a single seasonality factor. Build the pre-Christmas spike, the Christmas Eve curve, the twixmas surge, the first-week-of-January peak, and the January returns wave as distinct forecast components, each with its own contact-reason mix and AHT assumption. See building the annual forecast.
2. Allocate holiday explicitly and early. Christmas leave is the most contested holiday allocation of the year. A first-come-first-served system rewards the agents who know the system; a fair system uses tenure, prior-year fairness, business need, and an explicit cap per team. Whatever the policy, publish it in July or early August. By November every leave decision is awkward. See holiday and leave allocation.
3. Engage the outsourcer or seasonal partner by mid-August. If you use a BPO or seasonal agency, their capacity is finite and other clients are queueing for the same agents. Lock in volumes, dates, training windows, and quality expectations early. A briefing in October usually means second-pick agents.
4. Plan the recruitment ramp. Seasonal hires for Christmas need to be in seat trained by mid-November at the latest. That means recruitment running through September and training in October. Slipping that timeline by even two weeks compresses training, damages quality, and lands inexperienced agents into the busiest week of the year.
5. Agree the IT freeze window. Most operations freeze non-essential change from early December through to early January. Agree the dates with technology, ops, and product now — not in November when someone wants to push a release. A clear, published freeze window prevents Christmas-week incidents that nobody has capacity to recover from.
6. Decide the closed-day on-call model. Who’s on call across the closed block? How are they paid? Who covers Christmas Day vs Boxing Day vs the substitute day vs New Year’s Day? Volunteers first, then a fair rotation. Document the contact tree and pay arrangements in writing.
7. Build the twixmas staffing model. The week between Christmas and New Year is the week most under-planned. Volunteers, double-pay incentives, partial-day shifts, and skeleton-coverage models all play here. The decision needs to be made by September so people can plan their family arrangements.
8. Brief the real-time team. Christmas real-time is different. Match-day style playbooks for high-volume mornings, intra-day flex rules for the post-Christmas surge, escalation routes for delivery failures and weather disruption. See real-time playbooks.
The bank-holiday operating decision
For 24/7 and partially-open operations, the bank-holiday operating model is its own decision. The standard options:
Fully closed. Simplest. Customers route to IVR messages or emergency-only paths. Works for low-complexity B2C operations where Christmas demand is genuinely low.
Skeleton crew. A small volunteer team with enhanced pay covers the closed days. The model needs to be defined: which contact reasons get answered, which get told to call back, what SLA is realistic. Trying to run normal service with a skeleton crew damages morale on the day and customer experience after.
Reduced hours, normal coverage. Open 10am to 4pm, fully staffed within those hours. Concentrates the staffing decision into a clean window.
Full operation, enhanced pay. Required for emergency services, fraud, and some high-stakes B2C (travel, certain financial services). Volunteer first; mandate only if you have to; pay properly. Plan double the supervisor coverage you think you need — the day is unusual and decisions land on supervisors.
Whichever model you pick, publish the operating hours externally by mid-November so customers and partners can plan. Surprising customers with closed hours on Christmas Eve damages the brand more than the operational saving justifies.
The cultural side — the agents who don’t celebrate Christmas
A meaningful fraction of any contact centre team won’t celebrate Christmas — for religious reasons, cultural reasons, family circumstances, or because they simply don’t want to. The leading operations get three things right here.
Christmas-day working is often welcomed. Agents who don’t celebrate the day are frequently happy to work it — enhanced pay, quieter operation, and the social benefit of letting colleagues with families be at home. Asking openly (not pressuring) is usually well-received. Pretending the day is universally important is what damages trust.
The leave-allocation policy needs to be even-handed. Agents whose religious calendar peaks at a different point in the year (Eid, Diwali, Vaisakhi, Rosh Hashanah, Lunar New Year) should get the same priority treatment for their cultural high-points that Christian colleagues get for Christmas. A fair system says “your most important annual leave date,” not “Christmas.”
The cultural celebrations on the floor should be inclusive. A Christmas tree and a quiz is fine. Mandatory Christmas jumpers and a Santa parade are not. The decoration budget should also fund Diwali, Eid, Hanukkah, Lunar New Year, and whatever else the team brings — the operations that get this right end up with a richer cultural calendar than the ones that just do Christmas.
The post-Christmas returns wave
January is its own operational event and gets less planning attention than it deserves. The contact mix shifts heavily towards complaints, returns, account corrections, and unhappy customers. AHT is longer; first-contact resolution is lower; supervisor escalations are higher. Three planning considerations:
Skill mix. January favours experienced agents who can handle complex multi-issue conversations. If most of the seasonal hires roll off on 31 December, January quality drops sharply just as complaint volume rises. Stagger the seasonal roll-off through January.
Complaint capacity. Build a complaint-handling layer for the first three weeks of January. Either dedicated agents, escalation routes that work, or a clear “callback within 24 hours” commitment that actually happens.
Carry the morale. Christmas is operationally exhausting. The January team is tired before January starts. Recognising the December effort visibly — before the January grind, not after — pays back in retention and engagement through Q1.
The post-Christmas review — do this every year
The annual planning loop only closes if you write down what happened. By mid-February, run a structured review of the Christmas period: forecast accuracy by week and by contact reason, staffing accuracy day-by-day, IT-incident summary, what the outsourcer did and didn’t deliver, what the seasonal recruits added, the cultural wins and misses. The next planning team — which might be the same team a year older — needs that document. Most operations don’t write it; the ones that do plan progressively better Christmases year on year. See building the annual forecast.
Conclusion
Christmas is a stitched-together sequence of operationally distinct events — the pre-Christmas spike, Christmas Eve, the closed block, twixmas, the first week of January, and the January returns wave. Treat each one separately. Plan it by August. Publish the holiday and bank-holiday policy in writing. Be even-handed about the agents who don’t celebrate. Build a complaint capability into January, not just December. Write down what happened so next year’s plan starts from somewhere. The operations that do this run a manageable Christmas; the ones that don’t spend December exhausted and January apologising.
Pair this with building the annual forecast, holiday and leave allocation, peak season planning, real-time playbooks, and planning during the 2026 World Cup.