At noon on October 3, a friend of mine in the home building materials business called.
He is in Hainan, day three of the holiday.
He said the phone had not stopped for three days. Not because customers were calling him — because he could not stop checking it himself.
At 11 p.m. on October 1, a customer asked in the group chat when the goods would ship. Nobody replied.
At 8 the next morning, the customer asked again. Still nobody replied.
At noon, the customer wrote one line: "I'll go with another supplier then."
He read that message to me in a flat voice.
But he said he changed his flight that same day.
That was it.
Cut clean.
I asked him: at that moment, was there really nobody in the company who could answer that message?
He paused for two seconds.
The only person who could answer was on maternity leave.
You cannot blame him.
You cannot blame anyone for this.
The numbers I saw over these two days sting more than that story
The complaint and reporting centre of the Shanghai Municipal Administration for Market Regulation has just released its Mid-Autumn holiday figures.
14,817 consumer complaints and reports received, up 7.4% year on year.
Online consumption accounted for 87% of them.
But there is another number worth watching —
Over the same period, 44,000 enquiries of various kinds were answered.
44,000 against 14,817 is close to three times.
In other words, most of the communication between merchants and customers during a holiday is not arguing. It is "asking to be clear": when the goods arrive, whether the address can be changed, whether this model is still in stock, how to issue an invoice.
That category of question is astonishingly repetitive.
And it repeats every single day.
Repeats until nobody treats it as a problem.
I want to give this phenomenon a name: the holiday stress test
On an ordinary day you cannot see what is wrong with your company.
Business is running, people are at their desks, customers are asking, someone can answer. Everything is normal.
The moment a long holiday arrives, the structure shows.
Because a holiday does something nobody does on an ordinary day — it pulls the people off their desks and leaves only the process.
While the people are still there, you cannot tell which capability runs on process and which capability hangs on one specific person.
It is like not being able to tell whether a building stands on its load-bearing walls, or on that one temporary wooden prop.
One clarification first: the "break" I mean is not necessarily zero replies that day. It can also be a slow reply, or an inaccurate one. You will not feel it; the customer will.
What a long holiday exposes is usually three kinds of break
The first: the answer break.
The answer to a customer's question is not in the company. It is in a few people's heads.
That colleague on maternity leave knows how many days it takes to ship to Hainan, because she has handled more than 40 of those orders. But she knows it, the company does not.
The moment she goes on leave, that answer goes with her.
The second: the judgement break.
Some things are not a matter of nobody knowing the answer. It is that nobody dares to decide.
A customer says "let me think about this price" — do we drop 200 yuan? A customer wants to return an item — is it past the seven days? Normally the owner settles these in one sentence. The moment the owner is on a plane, everything jams.
The third: the policy break.
The same question, three people in the company, three answers.
A customer asks how many years the warranty covers. Customer service says three, sales says five, the technician says "depends".
Normally the customer only deals with one of them and cannot tell. During the holiday one is on leave and another takes over, and it falls apart on the spot.
Why I call this a free test
Because it costs nothing, and it is company-wide, passive and real.
You do not have to design a scenario, and you do not have to hire someone to play the customer.
The holiday arrives, the pressure comes on by itself, and the break points surface on their own.
14,817 complaints, 44,000 enquiries — behind those numbers is one and the same problem: the customers did not take a holiday, but the company's ability to respond did.
87% of the claims came in online — the customers have all moved onto their phones.
Our ability to respond, meanwhile, is still stuck at "office hours, plus somebody at a desk".
This is not a customer service problem. It is a problem of the time boundary of service capability.
Three kinds of break, three different costs
The answer break is the most expensive.
Because it happens every day. One customer asks, nobody answers, he leaves — you will never know. All you will see is that the numbers at month end came in a little short.
The judgement break is the most urgent.
Because it loses deals outright, and inexplicably — the customer will not tell you "I waited six hours and nobody would decide". He will just say "let me think about it".
The policy break damages trust the most.
Because it does not lose the deal; it loses the impression that "this company is reliable". And once that impression forms, it is hard to turn around.
With a few days of holiday left, three things you can do
One (do it today): pull out the 20 questions you are asked most.
No documents to write, no system to buy. Open your customer service chat logs, your WeChat groups, your order notes, and copy down the questions that keep coming back.
Twenty is enough. You will find that the first 20 cover 80% of the conversations.
It really is that simple.
Two (this week): give every question a standard answer.
Two requirements only:
First, the answer has to be something you can copy, paste and send — do not write "it depends".
Second, mark "this one has to go to a human" — anything touching refund amounts or contract terms must be a person.
Sorting out which questions the system answers and which a human must answer is far more reliable than handing everything to AI.
Three (only after the first two, talk about tools): let someone catch what arrives outside staffed hours.
Only after the first two are done does a tool become useful.
Get the order wrong and you have bought an empty piece of software — because your answers are not in it.
A counter-intuitive conclusion
Most owners assume the holiday problem is "not enough people".
What the holiday actually exposes is that "the answers are not in the company".
Not enough people, and you hire. That is 3,000 yuan a month, plus three months of training.
Answers not in the company, and hiring anyone will not help — the new hire still will not know how many days it takes to ship to Hainan.
So I would say a long holiday is worth half an hour of your time: wherever it breaks during the holiday is the thinnest wall in your company.
One last line
That friend who changed his flight said something later that I wrote down:
"I thought I was paying for eight people. It turns out I hired one person who can answer, and the other seven are waiting for him to tell them what to say."
A holiday will not cost you much revenue.
It only shows you clearly: who is it that your company actually runs on.
That is all.
Who we are:
We deliver enterprise knowledge bases and AI customer service for small and micro businesses. Concretely, that means helping you turn the answers that "only one person knows" into something anyone in the company can look up; then using AI to catch the repetitive enquiries that arrive outside staffed hours, and marking out separately the cases a human must handle.
We serve SMEs with fewer than 200 employees, starting from an inventory of your most frequent questions.
We do not require you to buy a system first.
#enterprise knowledge base #AI customer service #SME digitalization #holiday stress test #knowledge capture
If this was useful: tell me in the comments which link in your company broke during the holiday — the answers, the judgement, or the policy? I will pick a few and talk through how to patch them.
If it helped, a like or a share is appreciated. Thanks.