The holidays are our support team’s busiest time of year, this article covers how our support team is helping you and your clients at this hectic time of year.

The Pic-Time support team works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We have agents working around the world, we cover all time zones and work through the weekends. Our median first response time from January 2024 to October 2024 is 11 minutes, we aim to get this number below 10 minutes in 2025.

Occasionally we will have unexpected spikes in traffic and our response times are longer. If this is the case, your enquiry will wait in 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 to 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 doing to help keep queue times as short as possible, prioritize time-sensitive enquiries, and get you the answers you need.
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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 humans, 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.

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.

While some chats are prioritized, you can have peace of mind that every enquiry will receive a reply. Opening multiple chats about the same topic will only slow our agents down.

In the past 12 months we have added a client-facing Help Center. This gives additional resources for you to share with your clients if they need instruction when using the gallery. The articles are white-labeled, this means they do not reference any other photographer, so you can use them in your own resources. By giving proactive support to your clients, it reduces the load on Pic-Time’s support team so they can help with the tougher questions.

In addition to the client-facing Help Center, in 2024 we have added 115 new articles to our Help Center for photographers.
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Providing fast, kind and informative help is one of the core goals at Pic-Time. We hire additional support agents early in the year so they are skilled-up and ready for the busy holiday season. We conduct detailed analysis of trends in previous years to forecast additional scheduling required for peak holiday times. The support team work 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 🙏
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Longer queue times from October to December are to be expected. To get help, the steps we recommend to get help are:
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1) First, check out our Help Center . If you can't find the help,

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. There’s nothing worse than waiting longer because the team are waiting on clarifying information.