The starting position
Twelve permanent agents handled around 1,500 tickets a week. The festive sale brought 6,000. The previous year, twenty temporary agents had spent their first week shadowing, and in the rush that followed several promised refunds and replacements outside policy.
What they set up
Temporary agents were invited a week before the sale, scoped to their own team, and given the drafting permission. Three policies did the rest.
- Every reply by an agent in their first 14 days requires approval by a team lead.
- Any reply mentioning refund, replacement or compensation requires approval, whoever writes it.
- Round-robin across the temporary team, so nobody drowned while others idled.
How it ran
New agents drafted real replies from their second day, using canned responses for order status, returns and delivery. Team leads cleared their approval queue between their own tickets. "Request changes" with a short note became the main training tool - agents learned the policy from corrections on real tickets rather than from a slide deck.
The result
The desk absorbed four times its normal volume. No refund or replacement was promised outside policy. Median approval during the sale was under 20 minutes, and by the second week most temporary agents had passed the 14-day rule and were sending routine replies directly.