Over the last few years, retailers have seen a dramatic increase in customer service requests, and social media traffic between Thanksgiving and Christmas, according to new reports. The internet of things embeds intelligence into business processes to let us measure and manage the enterprise in ways that were never possible before. San Francisco-based AI powered customer service platform Helpshift has released its Holiday Performance Index. The index includes data from the company's retail and e-commerce customers during the 2017 holiday season,(November 22, 2017 to January 1, 2018). The report provides insight into retail and e-commerce support inquiry patterns during the holiday sales surge and shows just how critical automations and self-service options are for keeping support operations running smoothly.