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4 ways to support contact center calling redundancy
Cloud-based phone systems offer contact centers more reliability, but that doesn't mean they're immune to system failures. Learn how to safeguard your contact centers.
A critical component of customer experience is ensuring that customer calls are answered in a timely manner. If the customer service line is down or if agents aren't available, customers become disappointed and dissatisfied. Even a few minutes of downtime can cost organizations money, such as lost sales and recovery expenses.
Although cloud-based unified communications (UC) systems offer more contact center redundancy and resiliency, they are not free from operational and technological glitches.
Organizations migrate to cloud-based UC to reduce their server footprint and outsource support and management to the UC provider. Contact center organizations can also integrate with the new cloud-based phone system.
Microsoft Teams, for example, integrates with contact centers to provide capabilities, such as call routing, voice analytics, speech recognition, mobility and call scripting. Disaster recovery is another desirable capability as Microsoft invests more in redundancy and reliability for Teams. However, organizations must prepare their contact centers for other failures that could result in a phone system outage.
1. Connectivity redundancy
The greatest single point of failure for any organization hosting its calling platform in the cloud is its network and internet connection. IT leaders must ensure redundant networking and internet connectivity -- but not just for corporate headquarters. Remote users and offices must also be provided with multiple connectivity options. Consider deploying connectivity services from separate providers or using software-defined WAN services.
Additionally, service-level agreements for cloud-based phone systems provide reliability guarantees; a 99.999% SLA allows only five minutes of downtime per year, while a 99.99% SLA allows 53 minutes of downtime per year.
2. Security
Hosted systems can be vulnerable to cyberattacks fueled by something as simple as a leaked administrative credential. To ensure administrative systems are well protected, IT leaders must implement strict password policies and require users to use multifactor authentication before accessing a contact center's administrative console.
AI-powered threat detection can provide security monitoring that identifies and responds to threats in real time, such as traffic anomalies, data leaks and deepfakes.
3. Quality and performance monitoring
For organizations relying on hosted phone platforms, the right bandwidth makes a huge difference in call quality. System health and quality must be continually monitored to ensure the network has enough bandwidth to meet performance objectives.
Predictive analytics can proactively identify network issues, such as signal degradation or latency, and proactively trigger failover processes without disrupting service. This supports contact center redundancy by reducing downtime and optimizing bandwidth.
4. Patch and update management
Just like any cloud-based UC platform, Microsoft continuously updates Teams, and it's important that employees use the latest version of the software. Doing so helps keep operations secure and reduces the chance that a bug or an outage disrupts the user or client experience.
By following some of these recommendations, IT administrators can help ensure their phone system supports contact center redundancy. Even if Microsoft or another cloud provider itself suffers from an outage, these suggestions reduce client-side risks associated with configurations or system failures that could cause a system outage.
Reda Chouffani runs a consulting practice he co-founded, Biz Technology Solutions Inc., and is CTO at New Charter Technologies. He is a technology consultant with a focus on healthcare and manufacturing, cloud expert and business intelligence architect who helps enterprises make the best use of technology.
