Your contact center is the frontline of your customer experience—when it’s down, your business feels it immediately. Building resilience isn’t optional; it’s essential. Read on for practical strategies to build a contact center foundation so strong it stays steady no matter how much you grow or change.
You’ll unlock:
Let’s start with you. That bubblewrap of access controls and the dreaded annual infosec training might feel secure. But are you really taking the steps necessary to protect against contact center risks?
Drawing on insights from over 3,000 customers—both CCaaS providers and the enterprises that use them—our contact center experts uncovered top fears and the essential checks you need to mitigate them.
Network reliability
| Telephony and SIP resilience
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Platform and application resilience
| Scalability and load management
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Fraud and abuse prevention
| Security and access controls
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Workforce and agent continuity
| Monitoring, reporting, and insights
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Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR)
| Vendor and third-party dependencies |
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Interoperability and failover
| Governance, audit, and compliance
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Did you check all the boxes?
If yes, read on just to humor us.
If not, you need the primer on contact center resilience below.
We’ve prioritized the core competencies required to protect your contact center before leading to future-proofing strategies. First, let’s zoom out and refresh you on what’s at stake with an unguarded customer service operation.
You aren’t just fighting to protect your customers, you’re establishing a crisis-proof brand reputation. Dropped customer service calls and unreachable contact centers can damage customer loyalty—often in irredeemable ways—with competitive options waiting on your heels.
By building resilient contact center communications, you galvanize your position as a reachable and reliable brand. The prize? You get to keep the customer base you earned—and grow it.
Your toll-free setup requires you to make resilience decisions on multiple fronts. The hotspots here depict the pivotal places where your decisions either make you highly susceptible to outages or invincible to them. Let’s walk through them.
What works?
Monitoring your own traffic offers you a view of your network alone. What about upstream or downstream outages that could affect your calls?
What elevates CX?
You can rely on your carrier to get comprehensive outage insights into your entire market. For instance, Bandwidth Insights customers rely on our carrier-grade insights, gathered across all of our customers, alongside their own traffic monitoring to stay on top of network threats
Most companies use advanced traffic monitoring to spot anomalies or outages in their networks. If you automate this step with tools like anomaly detection and automated alerting, you can respond faster to potential outages.
In 2023, major network operators in both the UK and Australia faced major outages. In the UK, this put the concerned carrier’s emergency calls out of commission, affecting approximately 14,000 emergency calls over a 10.5-hour period.[1] For the Australian network operator, a 14-hour outage took down 10 million customers and had 2,145 people unable to connect to emergency services.[2] This is with failovers being available in some capacity.
So what could’ve helped?
An Active/Active toll-free network architecture.
This type of network setup runs traffic simultaneously across multiple carriers/routing paths, ensuring continuous uptime and seamless call handling during an outage. In contrast, an Active/Passive architecture has one network in use with other network(s) available on standby for failover.
What does an Active/Active network architecture look like?
The distributed nature of the Active/Active setup provides inherent fault tolerance, as the system can withstand individual network outages without service disruption.
If one network fails, the remaining active network can continue to serve requests, ensuring continuous availability of services with minimal or no downtime.
Active/Active network systems have multiple carrier interconnects. As call volumes increase, more call load can flow through different carriers.
Active/Active networks involving direct-to-carrier peering agreements and distributed workloads enhance call quality where there’s potential.
How much control do you have over your carrier relationships and call routes? When a network outage hits, can you get direct support from the affected carrier? BYO-Carrier solves that by unbundling your CCaaS from your toll-free carrier.
When you Bring Your Own Carrier, you choose your preferred carrier to power voice, messaging, and emergency services for your preferred CCaaS platform. Essentially, you’ll be one hop away from both your CCaaS platform and the underlying carrier.
While cost savings remain the top benefit of Bringing Your Own Carrier (for 58.21% of BYOC adopters), 37% report higher quality telephony.[3] It’s hardly surprising that over 53% of enterprises now BYOC. Increasingly, enterprises are turning to BYOC to build robust contact centers by putting control in the right place—their hands.
You get to pick the most reliable SIP trunk provider that fits your business. And they’re directly accountable to you for network reliability.
Move to or between CCaaS platforms easily, without compromising your network resilience. Or even retain a hybrid configuration, while managing the same vendor for both.
BYOC lets you distribute your telephony risk by prioritizing a trusted provider that offers multi-carrier redundancy.
Outages happen. With BYOC, rerouting traffic is fast and flexible—no begging your provider for action.
You’re not tied to inflated carrier contracts. Optimize routes and costs on your terms, not theirs.
You’ve built a great stack with reliable back-ups. Your CX is ready for take off.
Should it fly blind in the face of possible disruptions?
No savvy contact center goes without voice insights. By analyzing real-time call metrics, CX leaders can quickly identify issues, optimize performance, and continue to offer a consistent customer experience during peak demand or disruptions.
A modern carrier will equip you with self-service call insights capabilities that help you with:
You’re taking the right steps to build a contact center that can weather any storm—you’re actively strengthening your defenses. Are you sure those protections are actually working as intended and delivering the resilience you expect?
Use this quick scorecard to monitor and assess your contact center’s overall resilience posture. It’ll give you a clear picture of your strengths and areas where you might still need to level up—because a little extra reassurance goes a long way when your customers are counting on you.
| System uptime (%) | Percentage of time the platform is operational | ≥ 99.99% at the very least (≈ <5 min downtime/month) |
| Service interruption frequency | Number of partial/full outages per month or year | 0–1/month, <5/year |
| Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) | Avg. time to restore service after failure | <15–30 minutes |
| Failover activation time | Time to reroute to backup systems or carriers | <60 seconds for critical services *Exceptions apply |
| Multi-carrier readiness (BYOC) | # of active SIP/PSTN routes | 2+ providers |
| Carrier failover success rate | % of failovers without dropped calls | >99% |
| Geographic failover coverage | # of active regions for routing | 2+ regions |
| Cloud-to-cloud fallback latency | Time to reroute between clouds | <3–5 min |
| Network latency (RTT) | Round-trip time for voice/data | <150ms voice |
| Packet loss | % of packets lost in transit | <0.5% |
| Jitter | Variability in packet timing | <30ms |
| Bandwidth redundancy | Backup connection capability | Full failover path |
| Agent availability rate | % of scheduled time agents are logged in | >95% |
| Agent cross-skill coverage | % of agents trained for multiple queues | >75% |
| Agent readiness during disruptions | % of agents able to work during failover | >90% |
| Business continuity plan tested | Time since last live BCP test | <6 months |
| Monitoring coverage | % of systems monitored in real time | 100% critical |
| Alert response SLA compliance | % of alerts resolved in SLA | ≥95% |
| Incident RCA rate | % of incidents with root cause completed | 100% Sev-1/2 |
| Proactive incident detection rate | % issues caught before users report | ≥80% |
| Multi-factor authentication | % of agents with MFA enabled | 100% |
| Data loss during outages | # of records/calls lost | Zero |
| Compliance readiness | Adherence to PCI, HIPAA, DORA, NIS2 | Fully certified/compliant |
| Audit trail completeness | % of events/actions logged | 100% |
| Call drop rate during failover | % of calls dropped during reroute | <0.2% |
| Customer wait time during incidents | Wait time deviation during outage | <10% increase |
| Self-service deflection rate | % resolved via IVR/chatbot during outage | >40% |
| Post-outage CSAT recovery time | Time to restore pre-outage CSAT | <72 hours |
How did you score? Feeling shaky? Get help from veteran contact center experts here.
By closely monitoring metrics like system availability, network performance, failover readiness, and customer experience, organizations can create a contact center that not only survives disruptions but also adapts instantly. A resilient contact center doesn’t just bounce back from outages—it provides continuous service, keeps customer trust, and strengthens brand reliability, irrespective of the conditions.
Building a truly resilient contact center is a marathon, not a sprint. And it’s the first step in turning customer excellence into a profit center. Because resilience isn’t just tech—it’s trust. Build it, and your customers will never know the difference when disaster strikes. But your competitors will.
[1] – Operator fined £17.5m for 999 call-handling failures, Ofcom
[2] – Operator fined $12m after thousands could not call triple zero during 2023 outage , Guardian
[3] – Enterprise Communications Landscape report
Uncover the silent threats to Contact Centers in 2025—and learn how to protect yours.
