How AI Can Solve Seasonal Customer Service Spikes in 2026

Many industries experience customer service spikes at the same time each year: higher retail traffic during the holidays, increased healthcare activity during open enrollment—the list goes on. Customer service teams plan for these events well in advance, forecasting traffic, adjusting employee schedules, and hiring temporary staff to maintain service quality and minimize disruption.   

All those precautions, however, come at a cost. Onboarding seasonal workers take time and money and scheduling extra employee hours may incur overtime costs. On the other hand, the cost of doing nothing is even higher: increased customer attrition higher agent turnover, and damaged brand reputation.

Customer service teams need a way to consistently deliver high-caliber service during seasonal volume spikes without draining precious budgetary resources. That’s where AI comes in. With today’s advanced customer service AI solutions, teams can: 

What does it look like in practice? Below are real-world examples of how leaders in four major industries are leveraging AI to improve customer service outcomes during seasonal service spikes.

Tackling holiday retail traffic at scale

According to the National Retail Federation, holiday sales in November and December have averaged about 19% of total retail sales over the last five years. The NRT estimates that retailers hired between 265,000 and 365,000 seasonal workers (including store, fulfillment, and call center hires) to handle the added traffic in 2025.  

However, for many retailers, it might not have been enough. According to data from Adobe (as reported in Forbes), AI traffic to retailers grew 830% year over year—in the first part of November alone. With more customers using generative AI for retail shopping, customer service leaders are responding in kind, deploying AI solutions to improve customer experiences and drive engagement when resources are at their thinnest.

At the center of this holiday retail strategy: a unified AI platform. Platforms like Uniphore’s Business AI Cloud enable retailers to adjust every part of their customer service operations to seasonal fluctuations:

• Self-service agents can field countless customer queries. Advanced solutions, like Uniphore’s Self-Service Agent, can detect sentiment, intent, and emotion to deliver truly human-like CX at scale.
• Real-time guidance agents can scale seasonal support without scaling headcount, automating manual tasks andguiding agents toward faster resolutions with in-call prompts and next-best actions.
• Interaction analytics can detect key conversational trendsand correlations. Advanced solutions, like Uniphore’s Conversation InsightsAgent, go even further, generating actionable insights for improving CX and agent performance.

Streamlining healthcare open enrollment

At roughly the same time retailers are grappling with holiday traffic, healthcare payers are seeing a spike of their own. During the 2025 open enrollment period—which ran from November 1, 2024, through January 15, 2025—the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) reported that a record 16.6 million consumers signed up by the deadline for coverage starting January 1.  

Like retailers, healthcare customer service departments are turning to AI to manage the influx. This includes training new agents (which can begin as early as July), monitoring calls for compliance and quality assurance, and optimizing the patient experience. 

The impact? One service provider reported a 33% reduction in agent training time, a two-minute reduction in average handle time (AHT), and a reduction in after-call work (ACW) from days to minutes using Uniphore’s Business AI Suite.

Among the most popular AI use cases during open enrollment are: 

• New agent onboarding: Organizations that deploy AI agent assist solutions, like Uniphore’s Real-time Guidance Agent, have reported reductions in onboarding time by as much as 50%. 
• QA and compliance automation: Healthcare payers are also using real-time agent guidance—together with automated quality management (AQM)—to automate quality assurance scoring and compliance with strict CMS guidelines.  
• Fraud detection: To combat scams (which also spike during open enrollment), organizations are increasingly leveraging AI-powered communication recording to verify and authenticate consumers.

Automating tax season processes

Shortly after the holidays is the start of another season. Tax season in the United States runs roughly from the end of January (when businesses are required to send tax forms to employees) until Tax Day on April 15 (with additional weeks to allow for extensions). It can be a stressful—and often confusing—time for individuals and businesses alike, marked by tedious data entry tasks and ever-changing filing rules.

Fortunately, those are the types of tasks AI excels at.  

AI use during tax season has seen a steady increase in recent years. According to a recent survey by Thompson Reuters, 21% of tax firms reported using generative AI technology currently—a jump from 8% in 2024. Another 53% reported planning to use the technology or are considering it. Among the top use cases cited in the survey were:

• Tax research: Filing rules change from year to year. To stay current, tax firms are turning to AI, which can analyze and adjust tax documentation to meet new rules accurately and with minimal effort. 
• Tax return preparation: AI can similarly help with tax return preparation, analyzing relevant documents for required information and auto-populating forms—slashing administrative work by hours if not days. 
• Compliance automation: Firms are also using AI to ensure all tax-related documentation—including client interactions—comply with IRS requirements. For example, a real-time guidance agent may prompt an agent to share a key disclosure during a conversation.  

Flexing sportsbook service during major events 

Unlike holiday shopping, open enrollment, and tax season—which see customer service volumes rise over months—other industries experience sharp spikes around specific calendar dates.

Sports betting, for example, typically fluctuates during championship games. In its annual report, the American Gaming Association (AGA) estimated that U.S. sportsbooks could take in $1.39 billion in legal bets during the final game of the 2025 American football season.

Much of that activity happens remotely—on sports betting apps. To accommodate the sudden rush, sportsbook platforms are utilizing AI, flexing self-service and live assistance in the days, hours, and even minutes before all bets are locked in. And they’re seeing better customer service KPIs as a result.

That’s exactly what happened to one of the largest casino and hotel companies in the U.S. Leveraging Uniphore’s Business AI Suite, the iconic brand optimized its digital sports betting customer service experience, driving:

Looking to the months ahead… 

Seasonal volume spikes like these are consistent: they happen at the same time year after year. And with AI, they’re getting easier to manage. From assisting hordes of holiday shoppers to guiding agents (and patients) through open enrollment, AI is taking some of the stress out of the busiest seasons on the calendar. 

By scaling customer support across all service channels, customer service AI platforms like Uniphore’s are delivering out-of-the-box impact—reducing cost-to-serve, boosting agent performance, and improving customer satisfaction.

How do we know? Because we’ve seen how customer service leaders have used it time after time to create meaningful experiences and drive outcomes despite limited resources. And we’ll see plenty more as more businesses embrace scalable, actionable customer service intelligence in the busy months ahead.