For years, five nines has been the number that kept boardrooms comfortable. It looked clean on a performance dashboard and gave technology leaders a ready answer when executives asked whether the contact center could be trusted.
The problem, according to CX Consultant Rhona Bradshaw, is that it was never telling the whole story.
“It acts more like a smoke screen with regards to what’s actually going on,” Bradshaw says in this CX Today Roundtable.
The real damage, she argues, isn’t the full outages that trigger incident reports; it’s the persistent, low-grade degradation that chips away at customer trust without ever tripping a status page.
Founder and CEO of the CX Collective, Ty Givens, cuts straight to what resilience actually means on the ground.
“There are two questions. Can the customers get help? And can the agents do their job? Those are the two things that actually make an organization resilient.”
Everything else, she argues, is a distraction.
The shared dependency problem makes it worse. Givens describes organizations rolling out new platforms only to discover their redundancy was illusory all along, with multiple vendors sitting on the same underlying infrastructure, going down together the moment anything is tested.
Mike Wehrs, COO of TieTechnology, brings the sharpest focus to where AI fits into all of this:
“You can’t fix stuff by throwing advanced solutions on top of sub-adequate infrastructure and sub-adequate data.”
All three guests make the same point from different angles. AI doesn’t necessarily introduce resilience problems into the contact center, but it does have the capacity to find the ones that were quietly there all along.
