The Hidden Costs of Contact Center Downtime

The costs of contact center downtime are not always easily defined or quickly realized. Over the past month, we’ve evaluated the financial, employee, and customer impacts that a call center outage has on an organization. Our exploration of these costs would be incomplete if we didn’t highlight the hidden or unconsidered expenses of downtime.  That’s where we’re going in today’s blog.

The full impact of an outage is virtually impossible to measure as we’ll never have a complete understanding of customer deflections, staff morale implications or the loss of confidence in the brand, leadership, technology or all of aforementioned. It’s a scary thing to realize that contact center downtime will cause damage that you can never see or measure. When you consider these unknowns with those which can be measured it seems obvious that the contact center should proactively work to avoid downtime. And yet, many organizations implement technology that places them at an increased likelihood of an outage.

Do you know what an SLA equals in downtime?

Most contact center solutions offer an SLA (Service-level agreement) to their customers. These agreements represent an organizations commitment to system uptime and reliability and are often tied to some form of compensation when the agreement is not met. For most of these SLA’s, however, contact centers are unknowingly signing up to experience downtime and the nuances of the agreement are often designed to avoid paying the customers for localized outages. In other words, contact centers are left to deal with the fallout of an outage and the technology provider doesn’t have to do anything to help them. If this seems counter to many of the marketing mantras, it’s because it is.