Black Friday can push contact center volumes to two or three times their normal level, and nobody gets two or three times the agents. TrueEngage founder Alex Wierciński on two ideas for the peak on Genesys Cloud: let customers choose a channel by urgency and live wait time, and make empathy the fallback for the moments that go wrong.
Probably one of the most stressful days of the year for contact center managers, agents, and supporting engineers.
Volumes spike. CSAT drops. Customers get stuck in endless queues. Suddenly, those robust architectures and carefully prepared capacity plans don't seem quite so robust anymore.
And AI? Wasn't it supposed to solve all these problems by now? Well, apparently not.
And the numbers are pretty brutal. According to Concentrix, a Genesys partner, retail contact centers can experience two to three times their normal contact volumes during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Two or three times the customers. But certainly not two or three times the agents.
Even with better automation, smarter routing, and heroic efforts from your team, something has to give.
Fortunately, running a contact center has never been about perfection. It's about continuous improvement. Make things a little better than last year, and you can go home a happy camper.
It might be a bit late to redesign everything for this Black Friday, but here are two ideas worth considering, although, frankly, they apply to pretty much any peak-demand situation.
Don't force everyone into the same contact channel.
Offer website visitors and app users different ways to contact you: web messaging, web calls, WhatsApp, callbacks, contact forms.
Some real-time. Some asynchronous. Some scheduled for later.
A well-designed multichannel website contact widget can make all these options available in one place, rather than scattering them across your website or mobile app.
But simply offering different channels isn't enough. Customers need to know what they're choosing.
Contact centers spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to predict customer intent, prioritize interactions, and optimize routing.
But here's a thought: why not let customers help?
Imagine your website showing:
Now customers can make an informed decision.
Does someone asking about a return policy really need to compete for the same agent, at the same moment, as someone whose payment just failed?
Probably not.
Someone with an urgent problem might accept the 25-minute wait. Someone with a general question might choose asynchronous messaging on WhatsApp. Someone else might happily schedule a callback for tomorrow.
You haven't added a single agent. You haven't deployed another AI model.
You've simply given customers information and control.
And this is where real-time contact center availability becomes genuinely useful. Instead of hiding expected wait times inside the routing engine, why not expose them directly to customers, where they make their contact decisions?
Of course, those interactions don't magically disappear. But spreading them across channels and time can make a huge difference.
Don't just manage queues. Spread demand across channels and across time.
Your capacity planning will fail somewhere.
Your AI will misunderstand someone.
Some customers will wait too long. Others will get frustrated. And despite your best efforts, a few experiences will be genuinely terrible.
That's life.
What matters is what happens next.
And here's an interesting number. According to Genesys's 2026 State of Customer Experience report, 94% of consumers value efficiency as much as empathy.
Which makes perfect sense.
A customer who has spent an hour trying to resolve a problem probably doesn't want another chatbot apology or a generic "we value your feedback" message.
They want a human being who understands their frustration. And preferably one who can actually solve their problem.
Maybe that means a personal callback the following day. Maybe it means moving a web messaging conversation to a voice call. Or even a video call, where facial expressions and a little human empathy can make a difference.
I know, I know. Video in a contact center? During Black Friday?
Not for everyone, obviously.
But for the customer who has been let down, a genuine human conversation can sometimes do more than another ten perfectly automated interactions.
And if you can escalate from chat to voice or video without losing the conversation context, even better. Nobody wants to explain their problem for the third time.
Technology should make it easier to be human, not harder.
If you're a Genesys Cloud user or partner, this is exactly the kind of challenge we've built TrueEngage to help with.
TrueEngage extends Genesys Cloud with configurable, multichannel website contact widgets that can also be deployed in mobile apps and digital kiosks.
One place where customers can choose how and when to engage.
Mix Genesys Cloud web messaging with WebRTC web calling and video calling, asynchronous WhatsApp conversations, and contact forms. Offer immediate callbacks or let customers schedule a callback for a quieter time.
And here's the interesting part.
TrueEngage monitors Genesys Cloud's expected wait time in real time and visually communicates which contact options are available, unavailable, or particularly busy.
Customers don't need to guess. They can see their options and choose.
That helps distribute interactions across channels and time, based on customers' own priorities.
And when things go wrong (because they will), TrueEngage makes it easier to bring back the human touch. Agents and customers can switch seamlessly between messaging, voice, and video within the same interaction.
No need to start the conversation all over again.
Is that going to solve Black Friday?
Of course not.
But it might make the day a little less black.
To the managers watching dashboards, the engineers keeping systems alive, and especially the agents dealing with frustrated customers all day:
Good luck this Black Friday. We're thinking of you.
And remember, perfection was never the goal.
Improvement is.
Founder Perspectives | TrueEngage
TrueEngage reads wait times from Genesys Cloud every 30 seconds and applies a threshold to each channel in the website widget. When the expected wait for a channel passes its threshold, the widget hides that option, so visitors choose from the channels that can answer them now. Queues, routing and reporting stay in Genesys Cloud. The enhanced web messaging guide covers the widget settings.
Yes. A TrueEngage callback creates a standard Genesys Cloud callback against a chosen queue. Scheduled slots come from a Genesys schedule group with slot length and capacity limits, and when the expected wait passes the threshold, the immediate callback is withdrawn and only scheduled slots are offered. Owen Robinson's Black Friday customer service post walks through callbacks at peak in more detail.
The agent offers the upgrade from the TrueEngage Agent App inside Genesys Cloud, and the customer accepts in the widget. The chat stays open, the same agent continues, and the customer does not repeat the problem. The voice or video leg is recorded in Genesys Cloud and linked by ID to the chat it came from, so quality teams can find both.
TrueEngage installs from the Genesys AppFoundry. The install creates the Genesys Cloud objects it needs, including a role, groups, an app instance, an interaction widget, OAuth clients and a BYOC Cloud trunk. One script on the website, or a Google Tag Manager tag, then serves every widget configured in the TrueEngage panel. The installation guide lists each step.