Plan support for the busiest week of the year.

Black Friday doesn't bring new questions to a Shopify store. It brings the questions you already answer every day, all at once, on the weekend your team most wants to be selling. The stores that come out of it calm are the ones that decided the answers in October.

This playbook covers what to expect, what to set up, how to staff, and where an AI agent fits. For the dated version, use the BFCM support checklist.

What spikes during BFCM

The sale shifts your ticket mix toward a handful of types, in roughly the order shoppers hit them:

• Discount codes. A code that won't apply, a code forgotten at checkout, or a shopper who missed the sale. See discount code not working, forgot to apply a discount code and missed the sale price.
• Order changes in the first hour. Wrong size, wrong address, a second order that should have been one. See edit an order after purchase, update shipping address and cancel order.
• Delivery dates. Slower processing and fuller carrier networks raise questions before and after checkout: Black Friday delivery times, holiday shipping cutoff and will it arrive by Christmas.
• Where is my order. The largest share by December, covered in WISMO in peak season.
• Gifting. Gift receipts and orders sent as a gift to another address.
• Returns, later. The wave arrives after Christmas, under your holiday return policy.

What to set up before the sale

Most BFCM support problems are policy problems that show up in the inbox. For a week-by-week roll-out calendar and a guardrail list, download the BFCM AI CX readiness guide. Settle these by mid-November:

1. Write the sale rules down: which codes stack, whether sale items are final sale, and whether you honor the sale price for a shopper who emails a day late.
2. Publish your holiday shipping cutoffs and your sale-week processing time, in the same words everywhere.
3. Put each of those in your knowledge as an article, so every reply quotes the same thing.
4. Add a procedure for each spike type, with a When to use in plain English, and run Check trigger on recent conversations to see what it would and wouldn't catch.
5. Add the rules that hold in every conversation as Instructions, such as "Never promise a delivery date."
6. Mark Thanksgiving and any closed days as holidays in your business hours, so handoffs, SLA timers and away messages follow them.

Staffing and coverage

Plan coverage around when shoppers write, not your usual shifts. Sale emails, the evening after them and Monday morning are the usual peaks.

• Name one person each day who approves refunds and order actions waiting for the team. The "Order action needs approval" notification can email them outside business hours.
• Give the rest of the team the judgment calls: damaged items, exceptions, angry customers, anything with money attached.
• Let Copilot draft replies for your team on the tickets they handle, so a reply starts from your knowledge and past macros instead of a blank box.
• Decide what happens overnight. Aide can keep answering, or acknowledge, collect an email and pause, as the after-hours guide explains.

Splitting the work with an AI agent

The split that holds up under volume is simple: Aide takes the questions with a clear answer, your team takes the ones that need a decision. Each topic sits at one of three AI levels.

• AI Agent. Aide replies and acts within the matching procedure. Good fits: order tracking, code questions, shipping cutoffs, address changes and cancellations on unshipped orders.
• Drafts. Aide writes the reply and proposes the action, and a teammate confirms. New topics start here, so you can watch a week of drafts before trusting a topic.
• None. Aide answers from knowledge and hands anything it would have to do or promise to your team.

Order changes need the shopper to prove the order is theirs first. Refunds wait for a teammate by default, so a rushed weekend never turns into a refund nobody approved. The ticket-type guide walks through which topic to move up first.

The return wave after the sale

Returns trail the sale by weeks. Gifts bought on Black Friday come back after Christmas, under whatever holiday window you promised.

• Decide the window now and publish it with the sale, using the holiday return policy guide and the extended holiday returns template.
• Turn on returns in Aide when you are ready. It starts a Shopify return under your return rules, or opens your returns portal on the order, and the store approves the request by default.
• Read the handoff reasons and weekly knowledge gaps in January. They show what next year's knowledge should say before the sale starts.