The holidays are our support team’s busiest time of year. This article covers how our support team is helping you and your clients during this hectic season.
Background
The Pic-Time support team works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We have agents working around the world, covering all time zones and working through the weekends. Our median first response time from January to September 2025 was 11 minutes, we aim to get this number below 10 minutes in 2026.
At times, unexpected spikes in traffic may cause longer response times. If this is the case, your enquiry will wait in the queue for the next available agent. Our team can see the queue increase, and will call in additional help if needed. The team takes great pride in keeping queue times short and manages spikes in traffic as they arise.
Support traffic increases from October to December due to the holiday season; however, this type of spike is expected, and our team prepares for it. In previous years, we have seen traffic increase 4-5 times over the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend. It is unfeasible to quadruple our team size for a weekend to handle this load and maintain the same response times you enjoy throughout the year. Instead, we have added additional measures to help manage the load.
Below you will find some of the measures our support team is taking to help keep queue times as short as possible, prioritize time-sensitive enquiries, and get you the answers you need.
1. The AI Bot
General enquiries to our chat support are first directed through an AI Bot. When you ask a question to our AI Bot, it reads text from our extensive Help Center written by our educational content team, and generates a concise answer for you. You can click the link in the answer to the source article for more detailed information.
We highly encourage you to utilize the AI Bot - it's the fastest way to get an answer. If the response doesn’t help, you can click the ‘Talk to a Person’ button to be transferred to our human team.
We love the AI Bot because it helps answer your straightforward questions very quickly, while freeing up our support agents to answer those tougher, nitty-gritty questions.
2. Prioritization of Chats
Some topics are more time-sensitive than others, including help accessing your account, uploading photos, or your client needing help to place an order. Time-sensitive topics will be prioritised so our human support team can deliver help quickly to those who need it most.
While some chats are prioritized, you can have peace of mind that every enquiry will receive a reply. Please avoid open multiple chats about the same topic, as this will only slow our agents down.
3. Help Center Articles
Last year, we added a client-facing Help Center. This provides additional resources for you to share with your clients if they require guidance when using the gallery. The articles are white-labeled, meaning they do not reference any other photographer, so you can use them in your own resources. By giving proactive support to your clients, you help reduce the load on Pic-Time’s support team, allowing them to focus on tougher questions.
In addition to the client-facing Help Center, in 2025, we added 55 new articles to our Help Center for photographers, did a complete design overhaul, and updated and simplified over 200 articles. Our team continually creates and updates resources throughout the year.
4. Additional Support Hours
Providing fast, kind, and informative help is one of the core goals at Pic-Time. Most of our support team are photographers, so they understand your needs firsthand. We hire additional support agents early in the year so they are skilled up and ready for the busy holiday season. In 2025 we added 8 new faces to our support team. We conduct a detailed analysis of trends in previous years to forecast additional scheduling required for peak holiday times. The support team works additional hours during the holiday season to account for the increased traffic.
Please be kind to our support team, they work long hours and are here to help 🙏
5. Additional Tips for Seeking Support
Longer queue times from October to December are to be expected. To get help, the steps we recommend are:
1) First, check out our Help Center . If you can't find the help, proceed to step 2.
2) Contact our support team via the chat widget or email [email protected].
3) When speaking with the chat, give the AI Bot a chance. If it doesn't help, follow the prompts to talk with a human.
4) Leave detailed information in the chat so the team can get to work as soon as they see your enquiry. Provide detailed information in your message so the team can start working on your request immediately. The more you provide upfront, the quicker they can help you.