Contact Center AI Preflight: 12 Checks Before Live Calls

Here's the thing, contact center automation usually doesn't fail because the model isn't smart enough. It fails because the plumbing is weak.

Audio paths, routing, monitoring, security, and change control. The boring stuff that ruins your month.

Mid-sized businesses don't get the luxury of a messy rollout. One bad week trains customers to avoid the channel and trains agents to distrust the tool.

Treat go-live like a preflight, not a demo

If you want stable voice automation, you have to prove fundamentals before real customers hit it. Not "it sounded fine on my AirPods."

What most people miss, the failure mode rarely shows up as "telephony is broken." It shows up as "the bot is dumb."

1) Call quality and SIP trunk readiness

Verify the call path end-to-end, PSTN to carrier to SBC (or your telephony platform) to the AI layer to the agent queue, and back. Test inbound, outbound, transfers, consults, and callbacks.

Make codec support explicit. If someone pushes heavy compression, you might keep human-acceptable audio while ASR accuracy quietly falls apart.

• Document supported codecs and enforce them in routing.
• Record test calls and keep evidence tied to configs.
• Secure transport, TLS for SIP and SRTP for media when supported.

2) Uptime and redundancy architecture

Don't trust a single path. "We're redundant" often means "we pay a cloud bill," and that's not the same thing.

Check redundancy where it actually breaks, carrier routes and POPs, SBCs, contact center region, middleware, and the AI services. And decide what failover does to active calls, because some designs only protect new call setup.

Set voice and network thresholds, then alert before customers notice

This is where it breaks down in practice. Voice bots add hops, ASR, orchestration, tool calls, and TTS, and each hop adds latency and jitter sensitivity.

Measure during peak business hours. Quiet-hour testing lies.

3) Performance thresholds, latency, jitter, loss, MOS

Set measurable thresholds and alert on them. Cisco commonly cited VoIP design targets include under 150 ms round-trip latency, jitter under 30 ms, and packet loss around 0.5% to 1% or lower (Cisco).

Track MOS where you can, but don't stop there. Ask the real question, what happens when you breach the line?

• Define thresholds per segment (carrier, SBC, AI edge, agent leg).
• Alert on trend, not just hard failures.
• Define graceful degradation (simpler prompts, faster escalation, reduced TTS complexity).

4) Identity, authentication, and fraud controls

Fraud shows up fast in voice channels. Automation makes it easier to probe at scale, and you won't like what you find.

Protect outbound caller identity where applicable (including STIR/SHAKEN on relevant routes). Lock down admin and agent access with SSO, MFA, and role-based permissions.

5) Logging, monitoring, and alerting

If you can't see it, you can't fix it. And you definitely can't prove what happened when a customer disputes an interaction.

Separate signaling visibility from media visibility, because "call setup failed" and "audio degraded mid-call" require different action. Add synthetic checks, scheduled test calls catch problems before customers do.

Safety rails: privacy, escalation, and change control

Once you store recordings and transcripts, you own the risk. And once you let a bot act without a clean escape hatch, you own the outcome.

You don't fix this with optimism. You fix it with explicit policies and versioned systems.

6) Data retention, privacy, and redaction

Define retention windows by data type, recordings, transcripts, logs, and map them to your obligations (GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, depending on your world). Encrypt in transit and at rest, no exceptions.

Redaction is where teams overestimate reality. If you claim you redact PCI, prove it with failure cases and show what happens when the system misses something.

7) Human-in-the-loop escalation (with context)

Automation without context is dangerous. Define escalation triggers like low confidence, frustration, policy boundaries, compliance topics, and high-value accounts.

When you hand off, send context, a summary plus transcript snippets, so the agent doesn't start cold. And let agents correct the system, intent, fields, and outcomes, or the same mistakes repeat forever.

8) Prompt, knowledge base, and change control

Prompts and KB content are production code. Use version control, test in staging with realistic calls, and keep an audit trail of who changed what, when, and why.

Have a rollback plan that doesn't require a war room. The day you need rollback is the day stress makes people do reckless edits.

Operational reality: vendors, baselines, DR, and training

A pretty SLA isn't reliability. Reliability is behavior under stress, and whether you can recover without guessing.

And yes, you need numbers. Otherwise you'll argue opinions until everyone hates the project.

9) Vendor SLAs, certifications, and fine print

Read SLA definitions like a lawyer. What counts as downtime, which regions, which components, and what they exclude?

Validate security posture with certifications that match your risk profile (SOC 2, ISO 27001). Ask about incident history and whether they publish real postmortems or vague excuses.

10) Baseline, pilot, and ROI measurement

No baseline, no truth. Capture metrics before you touch the system, AHT, ASA, abandonment, FCR, transfer rate, cost per contact, and CSAT.

Pilot on a controlled slice, one queue, one issue type, limited hours, and define success and failure criteria up front. If you can't answer "what must not regress?", you're not ready.

11) Failover and disaster recovery testing

Plans you haven't tested are fantasies. Simulate pain on purpose, carrier failure, region failure, SBC failure, and watch what happens to active calls versus new calls.

Back up recordings, transcripts, KB content, and configs. Set RTO and RPO based on business tolerance, not whatever a marketing page implies.

12) Operational playbooks and training

Day 2 operations is where most rollouts die. Write runbooks people can follow under pressure and define ownership, who's on-call, who talks to the carrier, who rolls back changes.

Train agents and admins by role. Agents don't need a pep talk, they need to know how to correct the system when it's wrong.

A go-live trigger that actually holds up

You're ready to expand when voice quality stays inside thresholds during peak, escalations are clean and measurable, monitoring catches issues before customers do, and a pilot shows ROI without regressions in CSAT or compliance. If you can't show those four, you're not ready.

Want a second set of eyes on the plumbing before Week 1 becomes a fire drill? Electric Software helps teams in Lansing and beyond run managed service, managed security, and managed AI agent operations, call 800-683-7552.

Source: Cisco (VoIP design guidance commonly cited for latency, jitter, and packet loss targets).