How to manage high call volumes in the event of an unplanned system outage

This summer’s CrowdStrike outage is a stark reminder: a contact center must be resilient to avoid becoming overburdened with high call volume and customer interactions when an outage occurs – which inevitably will happen again. Unplanned system outages can cost a business up to $300,000 a year, and, on average, an organization can face around 22 disruptions each year. These could be a result of a third-party service outage, software updates and patches, data breaches, foul weather, or even human error¹. Regardless of the cause, downtime jeopardizes a contact center’s ability to make or receive calls, effectively cutting off a business’ main line of communication with their customers.

To weather the unplanned outage, businesses must deploy a best-in-class contact center automation solution. These solutions, using AI and automation, can surge elastically on demand when consumers try to interact with a company during difficult times, unlike contact centers that are primarily staffed with live agents. With contact center automation, callers are able to self-serve and, when needed, connect to a live agent during a network outage. Such a solution prevents dips in productivity, lost revenue, and a degraded customer experience (CX).

Contact center automation and virtual agents mitigate the impact of unplanned outages

While relying on a single platform or path for customer interactions, such as a web portal, may deliver certain operational efficiencies, it’s a recipe for disaster when a network outage happens. This lone path will negatively impact operations, specifically customer interactions, when there is an outage.  A sound communications strategy includes separate parallel paths for customers to access data. To achieve this, businesses must consider a three-pronged proactive avoidance plan:

• Independent networks and voice resiliency.  When there’s a widespread outage and networks are down, consumers can be adversely impacted — travelers stranded at the airport, airline and hotel websites down, banking websites unable to process requests, missed doctor appointments. Companies relying on a single point of entry, a portal or website, also have a single point of failure. For those companies unprepared to handle such an outage, their customers will inevitably turn to customer service, specifically through the contact center. Savvy businesses have a secondary route for customer interactions via its voice network. The best voice network provider will have multiple redundancies built in and will provide up to 99.999% uptime.
• Contact Center automation and the importance of virtual agents. A secondary voice channel as a redundant avenue for communications will only get a company so far, especially if its staffed by an army of contact center agents. During the CrowdStrike outage, contact centers were flooded with calls from worried consumers; unfortunately, many couldn’t handle the high call volume and calls were dropped. A more efficient solution harnesses cloud-based contact center automation which allows customers to self-serve through highly capable virtual agents, driven by generative AI, that can assist and resolve customer queries.  Interacting with a virtual agent takes place in the cloud, outside of the physical contact center without burdening one’s infrastructure. In addition to providing outage updates, these virtual agents can be trained to help callers rebook flights, book hotel rooms, access bank accounts, and respond to questions.  Virtual agents operate in more robust, highly available backend network, are less likely to be affected by an outage, and can access third party systems, such as CRM, CDP and content platforms. Less expensive than a real agent, virtual agents reduce the burden on the contact center while allowing human agents to focus on more critical calls and escalations.
• High call volume and queue management systems. When there is a large network outage it’s not uncommon for businesses to experience an incredibly large spike in call volume. Another layer of defense is the addition of a cloud queuing management system.  For contact centers with on-premises infrastructure, all calls go directly to a live agent which can quickly overburden the system leading to dropped calls. With a queue management system, calls are queued in the cloud and are released to the contact center when there is an available agent. Cloud queuing also gives businesses the option to reroute calls to a different contact center altogether, perhaps to a secondary facility that can handle additional inbound traffic.   Queue management systems enable contact centers to be more resilient while handling an influx of calls, preventing the loss of trust and a degraded customer experience. While in the queue, callers can receive real-time updates on the outage, and choose to use the virtual agent if so desired.

Contact center automation and advantages of OTT deployment

Automation is a critical part of any cloud solution. Automation can be used to handle day-to-day transactions that would otherwise go to a business’ contact t center or back-office agents. During an emergency, contact center automation provides the resiliency to maintain operations while also giving customers a second path to interact with a business. Additionally, automation can be implemented very easily on top of a company’s current infrastructure so there’s no-need to rip and replace systems already in place, it’s simply layered over-the- top (OTT), allowing for rapid modernization and a faster ROI.

Innovative companies use contact center automation to provide real-time status updates with pre-recorded messages to keep customers informed even during disruptions. And automated systems can connect to third party platforms for data connectivity allowing the virtual agent to be as effective as a human agent, especially when fortified and backed by generative AI.  As an added bonus, virtual agents are a fraction of the cost of a human agent and are available 24/7.

Another key benefit of contact center automation and the use of virtual agents is an increase in employee satisfaction and improved workforce engagement. Coupled with generative AI, customer service requests that don’t require human assistance can be automated while contact center agents gain more availability to work on other value-added and revenue-generating tasks².

IntelePeer’s SmartAgent

During a network outage, businesses will typically see high call volumes as consumers call in to report an outage, request a status update, or even deal with interactions they typically would have handled online. By layering SmartAgent OTT of current contact center infrastructure, brands can increase the agility of their operations which will protect them from the inevitable outage. SmartAgent passes inbound calls through a contact center automation workflow. The workflow enables callers to self-service via a virtual agent driven by generative AI for faster, more reliable response times. More complex inquiries can be sent to a live agent for handling.

Moreover, because the contact center is an essential part of the customer experience (CX), it must remain open even during disruptions. SmartAgent empowers businesses to uphold CX in the face of service faults, safeguarding customer satisfaction and dissuading them from going to competitors. SmartAgent also doesn’t require ripping and replacing current infrastructure saves money, minimizes installation delay, increases agility and scalability.

Coupled with generative AI, SmartAgent can act as a queuing management system. Automating up to 80% of incoming calls in the cloud alleviates the influx of calls to a contact center. For those callers who need to speak to an agent, and none are available, SmartAgent will hold the call in its cloud until an agent becomes available. With the elimination of dropped calls, businesses deliver a better CX.

With SmartAgent, businesses can automate more calls and reduce the number of interactions human agents need to handle. Contact center automation and virtual agents enables customer self-service which provides for a quicker resolution of an interaction, leading to a better experience. Implementation of this automation is quick and easy and doesn’t require the ripping and replacing of current infrastructure, as it easily layers OTT of existing systems. As a business grows, cloud-based systems can easily scale, eliminating the need to hire additional agents.

1. Digitalization, 2023 ↩︎
2. Time Doctor, 2023 ↩︎