The office should be able to keep operating without the agent and without waiting for the agency to respond. Test continuity and exit before launch, while the supplier is motivated to resolve problems.
Our recommended failure drill is:
- Disable the automation using a client-controlled procedure.
- Restore the agreed telephone or message-handling route.
- Identify calls and requests received during the interruption.
- Check which records were created successfully.
- Reconcile uncertain transactions before retrying them.
- Contact affected customers where a commitment needs confirmation.
- Record the cause, corrective action and restart approval.
The handover pack should identify account administrators, dependencies, credentials-management arrangements, billing owners, exports and the person authorised to change routing.
Do not accept an export consisting only of conversation transcripts. Ask for the customer/job references, timestamps, action outcomes and configuration needed to understand what happened.
Test the office’s ability to retrieve a sample record and execute the fallback without the supplier coaching each step. If it cannot, the exit promise remains unproven.