Liam Dunne is the Co-founder and CEO of Klearcom, a global leader in customer call path testing & real-time contact center optimization.
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Projects, as we all are probably well familiar with, have milestones, timelines and a defined end date.
The problem is that contact center migrations are not projects. They're operational exposure events, and until more leaders make that distinction, the same failures are going to keep happening—subtly, expensively, and in true Murphy's Law fashion, always at the worst possible moment.
I've spent years working on contact center infrastructure through my company, Klearcom, and the pattern I keep seeing isn't dramatic. Migrations that looked well managed in every update (on schedule, signed off, nothing flagged) often unraveled the moment real customer traffic hit the new environment.
Steps done and tasks closed don't tell you whether a customer trying to reach you right now can actually get through. If a number is misrouted, unreachable or intermittently dropping, the project might be technically closed while the business is fully exposed.
I watched this play out recently with a large global enterprise managing a switching of carriers across critical service lines. Routine on paper, but in practice, the service lines were switched off before transfers were complete. Customer notifications were inconsistent. The team thought they'd fixed it, but then it happened again. What should have been a controlled cutover turned into weeks of firefighting, letters and fatigue.
It wasn't a technology failure but a coordination failure, the kind that doesn't show up in the project plan. Regulators have recognized this tension for good reason: Both the FCC and Ofcom have specific guidance around number portability and service continuity precisely because "migration complete" and "customers can reach you" are not the same statement.
The scale of investment pouring into contact center modernization makes this problem more urgent by the day. According to Fortune Business Insights, the global CCaaS market was valued at $7.08 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $30.15 billion by 2034. That's a wave of migrations, and most of them are running with the same governance gap.
When contact center transformations go wrong, leadership teams tend to look at the carrier, the telephone vendor or the implementation partner. Sometimes the fault does lie there, but once the customer experience is affected, accountability returns to the business itself, regardless of where the failure originated.
It certainly changes how you think about your internal teams. In most enterprise migrations, Tier 1 NOC and support staff end up spending significant chunks of their time on things that should already be automated: confirming whether a line is down, chasing providers for acknowledgement, or verifying the same incident multiple times before anyone acts.
PagerDuty's research on NOC operations puts it plainly: Without automation, engineers spend too much time on routine manual processes for each issue—and with that time spent, organizations becomes less able to get proactive about incident response. That's an expensive way to use skilled people, and over the course of a migration, it compounds.
The organizations I've seen handle migrations well have deliberately taken repetitive verification and escalation work out of the NOC workflow. Once those teams aren't drowning in low-judgment tasks, they focus on what actually requires them: customer impact analysis, root cause prevention, resilience planning.
Speech migration is worth addressing specifically, because it's where I see the project mindset cause the most damage.
Most teams approach the DTMF-to-speech transition as an experience upgrade. It is, but it's also a failure risk multiplier. Speech systems introduce new prompts, new recognition dependencies and new escalation paths. If the underlying connectivity, routing and monitoring disciplines are weak going in, speech doesn't simplify the operation. It amplifies whatever weaknesses already exist.
AmplifAI's research found that while 88% of contact centers now use AI in some capacity, only 25% have fully integrated it into their daily operations. The gap between deployment and operationalization is where the risk lives, and speech migration sits right in the middle of it.
For starters, who independently verifies that the customer journey is actually working after each milestone, not just that a task is marked closed?
Who owns carrier escalation when nobody is returning calls?
What happens if a provider confirms completions, but customers still can't get through?
Which manual tasks are consuming NOC time today that should have been automated months ago?
These questions make a migration more honest, and also surface the operational gaps early when there's still time to close them correctly.
Contact center resilience comes from how well a business handles the small, unglamorous moments between intention and reality: the handoff that didn't transfer context, the verification gap that was skipped, the recurring problem that everyone agreed should be automated and somehow never was.
If you're planning a migration in the next year or so, start by reframing it internally. Not a project with a go-live date, but rather an operational exposure event that requires continuous observability from planning through to post-cutover stability. Take the repetitive triage work off your most skilled teams before the migration starts, not after something breaks.
Cost reduction and automation are still the right goals for your business, but the leaders that achieve them best are the ones applying that discipline beyond the customer-facing layer, right into the operational plumbing that keeps service stable when everything else is in play.
I say all this because at the end of the day, your customers don't care whether the migration was delivered on time and on budget. They never know it happened anyway. They care whether they can reach you when it matters. Right now, in most enterprise migrations, that's still not a question anyone can answer with confidence until something goes wrong.
Stop waiting for that moment to find out.
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