What’s the damage? Calculate the cost of CAT-season call failures

September 9, 2026

9 min read

Customer satisfaction averages 337 out of 1,000 when communicating with an insurer is difficult, compared with 777 when it’s very easy.^[1] The 440-point difference raises a carrier-layer question: how much communication difficulty begins before the policyholder and agent can even speak?

Failed claims calls come at a premium during CAT season. Suppose your claims line receives 500 first notice of loss (FNOL) or claim intake calls in a normal two-hour window. When a catastrophe drives a fivefold surge, the total reaches 2,500 attempts. If a regional carrier outage degrades call delivery and 40% of the calls are abandoned, 1,000 unsuccessful attempts to report a loss put customer experience on the line.

Insurance contact center outages during a catastrophe event are more common than most people would expect. And while there can be more than one reason for such a disruption, many insurers don’t account for the fallout that follows when calls and reconnects don’t reach the CCaaS at all. Doubling down on carrier-level resilience can help guard against the costly impact.

The CAT Season Carrier Readiness report identifies gaps that CCaaS platform and AI tooling evaluations may not expose. The next step is to pin down the cost at stake from unresolved carrier gaps.

The CX cost of carrier failure

Downtime is easy to misprice because it sounds like a problem exclusive to IT. But CX teams also take the hit in the metrics they own.

Claims satisfaction scores

Carrier failures pile onto the frustration policyholders are dealing with during a CAT event. When they later rate how easy or difficult it was to report a loss or get claims updates, failed calls count against the insurer. Communication difficulty is linked to lower overall satisfaction, and at CAT-season volume, one outage leaves far more policyholders dissatisfied in a short window.

First-contact resolution

During a CAT surge, the extra workload can outlive the outage itself and keep operational costs climbing even after service recovers. Carrier congestion turns one claim into two calls (or more) before anyone starts resolving it. Another attempt adds to an already crowded queue of new claims and callbacks. The calls stack up and drive wait times higher for everyone.

Policyholder retention

Between 65% and 70% of insured consumers favor phone-hotline support, depending on age, with older customers the most likely to choose it.^[2] For policyholders who prefer the phone, claims intake or FNOL calls that drop or never connect factor into how they remember the claims experience as they decide to renew policy or shop around.

Carrier failure is not just a tech problem for IT to fix. When it begins disrupting customer and agent experiences, the damage could end up costing more than you budgeted.

CAT-season downtime cost estimator

The calculator below helps estimate the potential retention and revenue loss that an insurance contact center could bear as a result of an outage. The estimates are meant to be illustrative only. Start with your operating data, then adjust the outage length and CAT surge to see how the cost could build as more calls come in.

CAT season claims call cost estimator

Your contact center

Claims intake calls per hour 500

Average handle time per call 8 min

Claims agents on shift during peak hours 50

CAT event parameters

Surge multiplier 5x

Industry benchmark for a major CAT event. Adjust based on your historical data.

Outage duration 2 hr

Call abandonment rate during surge 40%

Reflects regional carrier degradation during peak CAT volume.

Business value

Average annual premium per policyholder $1,200

Blended agent cost per hour (fully loaded) $35

Your results

Calls/hr exceeding agent capacity

2,125

during CAT surge

Claims intake calls missed

2,000

during outage

Policyholder premium at renewal risk^A

$480K

at next renewal

Operational recovery cost^B

$5.6K

in recovery

This estimate covers a 2-hour outage at 5x CAT surge volume. It reflects carrier-layer failure only and does not include regulatory exposure, litigation risk, or CSAT score decline.

For property and casualty insurers, claims intake volume includes FNOL calls. For health insurers, it includes member claims calls and intake lines.

^A 20% assumed non-reconnect rate within 24 hours.
^B 60% callback rate assumed during the recovery window. While we assumed 80% reconnect rate in ^A, we’ve accounted here for policyholders reaching voicemail, abandoning callback, and contact via another channel.

Once you have the CAT-season downtime cost estimates, along with your carrier-readiness score, talk to your team. Make the budget case for reducing exposure to carrier downtime by weighing the cost of the proposed changes against the cost of inaction.

The four carrier weak spots behind claims call disruption

There are four key failure points where the carrier layer could contribute to your downtime bill.

Surge capacity: CCaaS platform redundancy and carrier layer redundancy are not the same thing. And confusing them is one of the more expensive assumptions an insurance contact center can make. A redundant CCaaS platform keeps agent desktops live, queue management running, and routing logic intact. It cannot route a call that the carrier never delivered. Carrier layer redundancy is the question of whether a call can reach your platform at all. A fully redundant CCaaS with a single carrier path is still a single point of failure.

Most contact centers are built on Active/Passive failover: a backup carrier waits on standby until the primary goes down, then takes over. The switch takes time. During a surge, that delay is measured in abandoned calls. Active/Active architecture keeps two carrier paths live simultaneously. If one goes down, calls continue on the other. There are no noticeable delays and hence, no queue of policyholders who can’t get through. For a claims line handling 2,500 attempts in a two-hour window, a switchover delay with Active/Passive architecture becomes a CX crisis.
Number reputation degradation: Nearly 80% of consumers will also block calls from numbers they don’t know.^[3]

When claims adjusters follow up on claim intakes after a CAT event and their numbers appear as spam, or appear unnamed and unbranded, policyholders may ignore critical updates they were waiting for. The adjuster tries again, or the policyholder calls back later. To reach the customer, either the policyholder has to call back or the adjuster has to try again. High-volume outbound operations that only increase in a CAT event means your numbers can get flagged as spam more frequently due to the change in call pattern. The problems add callbacks and handle cycles that snowball.

Without number reputation management and authenticated branded calling there’s a good chance your calls arrive marked as spam or without your branded ID and get ignored.
Compliance exposure: Compliance obligations extend across the full carrier and platform stack and can vary depending on the services you consume. Carrier services may be subject to their own terms that differ from software terms. During a CAT event, insurers see a higher volume of sensitive exchanges: from identity verification to payment of claims deductibles to medical emergency disclosures. Work with your legal counsel to confirm how each layer of your infrastructure is addressed in your vendor agreements and SOPs.

Migration gaps: Cloud CCaaS migrations may depend on legacy carrier trunks that remain the only call path and are tied to complex, on-prem contact center platforms. Without an alternate route, claims calls won’t resume until carrier service returns. Still, 74% of insurers rely on legacy infrastructure for core processes^[4], while 45.5% report integration problems with new technologies.^[5] The safe alternative is setting up parallel SIP trunks and decoupling the porting process: porting numbers in bulk while keeping them configured to route to your existing legacy setup. When you are ready for the cutover, an API-driven configuration change can move the destination to the new CCaaS platform, ensuring no disruption and providing an instant rollback path. Share the parallel path migration guide with your infrastructure counterpart.

The checklists in the CAT Season Carrier Readiness report assess whether the weak spots are present in your carrier infrastructure.

What the carrier readiness score means for your business case

Find your carrier readiness level below and note what to focus on ahead of CAT season.

0–6 criteria met: Surge-vulnerable

Low surge readiness points to missing or unverified infrastructure safeguards. With the carrier layer exposed, the next catastrophe is more likely to push claims-call abandonment above normal levels and drive costs up fast. Use the calculator result to put a price on the exposure. More policyholders could also end up in the lower-satisfaction group that finds insurer communication difficult. At 0–6, postponing action poses too much risk, given that 47% of consumers use the phone to contact their insurer.^[6] Prioritize reducing the vulnerabilities rather than spending more on the calls that connect.
Explore Active/Active carrier setup

7–13 criteria met: Surge-resilient with limits

More than half of CX leaders expect call volume to rise by 20% over the next two years.^[7] For a 7–13 score, the projected growth eats into the headroom you have left for a CAT surge. Run the calculator with a realistic surge multiplier, then test a longer outage to estimate the cost if capacity runs out early. Fix the remaining weak spots before they become a problem in the next CAT event.
Explore Active/Active carrier setup

14–18 criteria met: Surge-prepared

If you score 14–18, chances are you’ve taken carrier-readiness steps like moving to BYOC. More than 50% of surveyed enterprises adopted BYOC in 2025, and 19% planned to do the same.^[8] You’re not walking into CAT season with major carrier gaps to fix. You’re already at a level other insurers are still working toward. The calculator shows what could be at stake if that readiness falters under a claims-volume spike.

Add the carrier variable to the CX equation

After a catastrophe, policyholders want to know they’ll get a fair settlement and be kept updated on their claim. Claims teams will struggle to do either if calls can’t get through.

You’ve got the illustrative cost of failed calls and your carrier-readiness score. That combination is the business case to take to your CFO along with your infrastructure lead. Carrier-layer disaster recovery for an insurance contact center is a configuration: Active/Active paths, parallel path migrations, and unified number reputation monitoring running before the next named surge.

The carrier readiness checklist tells you which of those you have covered and which need you to make carrier-level changes. Start there. Then bring the results to a carrier engineer and find out if your infrastructure is up for your contact center’s busiest hours.

The information provided in this article does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal advice; instead, the information is for general informational purposes only.

All figures and calculations are illustrative only and do not represent guaranteed savings for any specific contact center architecture. Actual outage costs vary based on your environment and technology stack.