How Carter's reduced seasonal hiring by 60% with PolyAI
Carter’s handles millions of customer conversations a year, with volume spiking 60% every holiday season. Today, their PolyAI agent absorbs that surge without a single extra hire.
Challenge
Extreme seasonal demand required hiring up to 200 agents for just a 6-8 week period each year, while an existing IVR contained only 2-5% of calls and a growing Spanish-speaking customer base wasn't being adequately served.
Solution
A 24/7 omnichannel agent handling 100% of interactions in English, Spanish, and French, scaling automatically with call surges to support contact center staff across FAQs, price adjustments, refunds, and callback scheduling.
Result
60% reduction in seasonal hiring, saving over $1M annually, with a 73% improvement in average speed to answer and 80% chat containment.
Peak season pressure, year after year
Every year, Carter’s experiences a surge in customer calls between the back-to-school period in August through Christmas, peaking significantly during Thanksgiving and Black Friday. During this peak season, volume increased by 60%, prompting Carter’s to hire additional staff and rely on BPOs.
Adding to these challenges, changes in the US labor market made it more difficult than ever to hire. Mike Hansen, Director, Call Center Ops, found that he had to hire six people to retain one, making the process of hiring, training, and ramping up new contact center agents both lengthy and costly.
Between 75% to 80% of customers were calling simply to track their orders. In response, Carter’s implemented an automated IVR system that sent SMS notifications with order-tracking links. However, customers were only taking up this offer 2%-5% of the time, leaving these simple, repeatable calls to be handled by a live agent. A better solution was needed.
Meeting customers where they are
PolyAI worked with Carter’s to implement an omnichannel AI agent that best represents their brand. Fluent in English, Spanish, and French, it sounds like one of their best agents and provides consistent service across channels and languages.
PolyAI began by automating Carter’s most common customer requests across voice and chat, including FAQs, account management, order management, tracking, and cancellations. Thanks to PolyAI’s proprietary technology and world-class design team, customers can speak naturally and not only have their needs understood but also resolved flawlessly. The AI agent asks clarifying questions to understand the customer's needs and help them resolve their query, just as a human would.
The PolyAI agent can also handle price adjustment and refund requests. It automatically looks up and confirms available discounts, then issues the refund back to the customer’s original payment method, often resolving these calls in under 90 seconds. For those who want to speak to a human agent, PolyAI implemented a new callback scheduling option to reduce wait times and let customers call back at a time that’s convenient for them.
We weren’t trying to replace associates, we were trying to do a better job with the associates that we had and reduce the expense of the constant churn of temporary associates.
From voice to omnichannel
With voice performing strongly, Carter’s expanded the partnership to include PolyAI web chat, giving customers another way to get instant help in their channel of choice. On chat, the agent goes beyond support. During the holiday season, shoppers can find gifts using natural language, asking for things like "Christmas sweaters for girls" and getting immediate, relevant results.
The same agent handles the full post-purchase journey: late deliveries, missing items, and incorrectly placed orders. Rather than deflecting these queries, the agent resolves them directly within the chat window, taking significant pressure off phone lines during Carter’s busiest weeks.
Every customer likes the fact that we answer their call right away. A lot of callers thank the agent at the end of a call, which says volumes about how they feel about it.
Results
reduction in call volume
chat conversations resolved
saved in annual seasonal hiring costs
With the omnichannel agent deployed, Carter’s is now answering every customer request immediately. Instead of set phrases or IVR trees, the agent welcomes every customer with a friendly greeting and asks, “How may I help you?”
The voice agent has reduced call volume by 37%, a 7.5X increase from the previous IVR. The impact of chat has been similar, with 80% of text-based conversations successfully resolved without human agent input.
Over Black Friday weekend, the chat agent handled 27,000+ high-intent conversations and 81,000+ dialogue turns, absorbing a massive surge in support queries through Carter’s web chat function without any downtime. That single weekend saved Carter’s 2,250 hours of human labor, the equivalent of 28 full-time agents working non-stop for 72 hours.
The agent achieved a 73.2% containment rate, meaning the vast majority of customer needs were resolved entirely without human intervention. For the 26.8% of cases that needed a human touch, the handoff was seamless. The agent facilitated 3,000+ live agent transfers with zero queuing time, so human agents focused exclusively on complex, high-value cases.
With thousands of conversations handled daily, peak staffing pressure is a thing of the past. In their first peak season with PolyAI, Carter’s reduced seasonal hiring by 60%, with shorter wait times and better customer experience to show for it. That reduction alone saves an estimated $1M+ in hiring costs each year.
Our AI agent has enabled me to reduce hiring this year by over 100 people, and has truly helped us to provide consistency for our customers.
Future plans
The chat deployment during peak season proved that PolyAI can operate as a critical safety net at scale, handling sensitive frontline issues like payment processing outages while keeping brand reputation intact. Building on that foundation, work is now underway to enhance multilingual capabilities across all channels and expand the agent's scope across new use cases, giving more customers the service they deserve.
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