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Quick AnswerGrowth in the UC space no longer shows up as a GDP statistic. In today’s UC environment, growth is dependent on calls, chats or video sessions always connecting. But always connecting is not the same as always working. Contact center call volume and headcount are both climbing at double-digit rates, year-on-year, and chat, video and social channels are expanding alongside voice rather than replacing it. For UC and contact centers, the real risk is the increasing complexity of the multi-vendor stack. A connected call that still fails is a resilience problem that exists outside of uptime. |
The TL;DR
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Contact center call volume and headcount are both growing at double-digit rates year-on-year. This is an infrastructure, not a decline-of-voice development.
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Voice isn't being retired by digital channels. It still accounts for the majority of interactions, even as chat, video, and social usage grows alongside it, making the stack more complex, not simpler.
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Downtime and third-party vendor risk is becoming more expensive, as more interactions run through multi-vendor UC and contact center stacks.
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A call can connect and still fail the customer. That gap is what IR calls interaction visibility, and traditional uptime monitoring is unable to see it.
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Australia and the wider APAC region are scaling interaction volume and IT investment as fast as the infrastructure underneath it.
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Instead of just calling it ‘uptime’, IR Collaborate, powered by Prognosis, keeps every call, chat, and video session visible.
Today’s growth is about call volume, not GDP
For a long time, ‘digital economy’ content measured growth as GDP share, ICT spend, and market size. For today’s UC and contact center leaders, the important number is call volume, and call volume is rapidly climbing.
Natterbox's Contact Center Benchmarks 2026 study, drawn from 58.2 million calls across its customer base and a survey of 178 contact center leaders, found call volume grew 16.1% year-on-year, with active headcount up 17.6% over the same period (Natterbox, Contact Center Benchmarks 2026, May 2026).
As this is a vendor-run industry benchmark rather than independent analyst research, the precise figures are directional, but the trend they point to is unambiguous. As the study puts it, ‘voice is growing, not retiring,’ and headcount is growing faster than call volume, which suggests organizations are betting on continued expansion, not managing a decline.
This fact is the opposite of what much ‘digital transformation’ content still assumes. The channels are multiplying. The volume running through all of them, voice included, is going up.
Instead of voice being displaced, it’s now a multi-channel mix
Today’s interaction economy is not a single-channel story. In Call Centre Helper's 2025 survey of contact centre professionals, sponsored by Five9, NICE, Scorebuddy, and Peopleware, voice (inbound and outbound combined) still accounted for 63.1% of all contact centre interactions. Email 15.9%, live chat 7.5%, self-service 3.4%, and chatbots 2.8%. Video chat accounted for just 0.1% of the mix. Inbound voice alone did dip slightly, from 53.1% in 2024 to 49.4% in 2025, showing the survey's first recorded decline, but combined voice held its position at the top of the mix (Call Centre Helper, "What Contact Centres Are Doing Right Now, 2025 Edition)
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The interaction economy is the growing volume of calls, chats, video sessions, and agent-assisted conversations that now run through an organization's UC and contact center infrastructure. It expands on the more concrete, operational version of ‘digital growth’. |
Voice holding its position doesn't mean the stack is staying simple.
Gartner predicted in 2023 that by 2026, 20% of inbound customer service contact volume would come from non-human, machine customers and requesters, such as connected devices and virtual assistants. (Gartner, March 2023).
“Machine customers will reset customer expectations about what constitutes a low-effort experience, creating a greater competitive gap,” said Uma Challa, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, when the prediction was published in March 2023.
Whether or not that exact share has landed or not, the direction is clear. There are an increasing number of channels, more automated requesters, and all this additional volume running through the same UC and contact center stack.
What goes wrong when volume outpaces visibility
Every additional call, chat, and channel is also additional exposure. When a UC or contact center stack goes down, or degrades without notice, the cost isn't abstract.
ITIC's 2024 Hourly Cost of Downtime survey of more than 1,000 firms worldwide found the average cost of a single hour of downtime exceeded US$300,000 for over 90% of mid-size and large enterprises. 41% of these reported hourly costs between US$1 million and over US$5 million. (ITIC, 2024 Hourly Cost of Downtime Report, September 2024).
IR has already walked through what that looks like in dollar terms for one contact center, call by call, in our blog, ‘How much is UC&C Downtime costing your business?’
The point that matters, is that exposure is compounding as more of the stack depends on third-party vendors.
The World Economic Forum's Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 found 65% of large organizations now cite third-party and supply-chain vulnerabilities as their greatest cyber-resilience challenge, up from 54% a year earlier (World Economic Forum, Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026, January 2026).
A UC or contact center stack is a complex surface, with carriers, SBCs, CCaaS platforms, and collaboration tools from multiple vendors, all needing to work together on every single call.
A customer won’t wait around to find out whose fault it was when something goes wrong.
Direct customer abandonment rates (2025-2026 data)
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Context |
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Over 50% leave after one bad experience |
More than half of consumers state a single bad interaction is enough to make them switch to a competitor. |
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52% have stopped buying due to bad CX |
A direct reflection of revenue lost specifically to poor product, service, or digital experiences over the past year. |
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70% leave after two bad experiences |
While 24% will leave after the first strike, the threshold drops off steeply by the second negative encounter. |
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72% switch after three or fewer poor interactions |
Specific triggers include long hold times (53%) and having to repeat an issue multiple times (54%). |
‘Is the system up?’ vs ‘Is the system working?’: Two completely different questions
Traditional monitoring answers one question: is the system up? For a UC or contact center stack, that's necessary but nowhere near sufficient. A trunk can be up, but calls can still drop out mid-sentence. An IVR can pass every functional test and still buckle the moment real call volume hits it. This failure mode has been discussed in an IR blog.
The same IVR that works perfectly for one test caller can fall apart under the concurrency of a real peak.
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“Is it up?” (uptime monitoring) |
“Did it work?” (interaction visibility) |
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Confirms the trunk, server, or platform is online |
Confirms the call, chat, or video session actually completed cleanly |
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Waits for a threshold breach or a user complaint |
Reveals degraded quality like dropped audio, IVR failures, routing errors before customers report it |
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Treats each vendor and channel as a separate system to check |
Sees call and video quality across every vendor in the stack, end to end |
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Built to catch outages |
Built to catch the connected call that still failed the customer |
Waiting for customers to report bad calls is the most expensive type of alert. It arrives reactively, after the damage has been done. Interaction visibility is about testing and monitoring proactively, so that degraded quality shows up on a dashboard when it happened at 3:00am, instead of in a customer complaint hours later.
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Interaction visibility is knowing not just that a call, chat, or video session connected, but that it actually worked. That means clear audio, no dropped packets, a resolved query, across every vendor and channel in the stack. |
Australia and APAC are scaling interaction volume as fast as the infrastructure underneath it
The gap between build-out and visibility is clearest in Asia Pacific, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s latest research. The region’s data center development pipeline is at a record 25.6GW as of H1 2026. This figure is up 7.1GW in just six months.
“AI and cloud investment across Asia Pacific has entered a phase of rapid, power-constrained execution,” says Andrew Green, Head of Data Centre Group, Asia Pacific, at Cushman & Wakefield
Pritesh Swamy, the firm's Head of Research & Consulting for the Data Centre Group in Asia Pacific, adds: “Speed to market is increasingly shaping development decisions. Modular construction and advanced cooling technologies are helping operators maximize infrastructure while shortening deployment timelines.”
Australia's own technology investment is climbing in step: Gartner forecasts Australian IT spending will exceed A$172.3 billion in 2026, up 8.9% on 2025.
For an Australian company like IR, with nearly 40 years in this space, and the majority of our own workforce based in APAC, this build-out shows a familiar pattern, in that infrastructure investment in this region has consistently outpaced the visibility layer needed to run it.
For any large multi-vendor enterprise organization, looking to scale volume across APAC, it’s a gap that needs to be closed before it closes on its own terms.
How IR Collaborate keeps every interaction visible, not just ‘up’
IR Collaborate was built to solve precisely this problem. Powered by Prognosis, Collaborate delivers observability across unified communications, collaboration, and contact center ecosystems, helping teams prevent issues before they impact performance and experience, across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments.
For contact centers specifically, it means preventing the issues that disrupt availability, voice quality, and customer experience, so teams can deliver consistent, high-quality service while scaling operations.
It's real-time visibility integrated with call quality and performance, so teams can identify exactly where quality degrades and act with confidence, instead of finding out from a customer complaint.
This includes customer experience testing across voice, web and video, so an IVR or call flow is validated under realistic concurrent load before customers ever reach it, not after.
Find out how IR Collaborate can help your organization stay ahead of interaction volume in a hybrid environment.
FAQs
Why is contact center call volume still growing?
Despite the growth of chat, video, and social channels, voice is holding its position rather than being retired. Organizations are scaling for more interaction volume across every channel, not managing a decline in any one of them.
Is voice really still the dominant channel?
Yes. Combined (inbound and outbound), voice still accounts for 63.1% of all contact center interactions.
What's the difference between UC uptime and interaction visibility?
Uptime confirms a trunk, server, or platform is online. Interaction visibility confirms the call, chat, or video session that ran across it actually worked without dropped audio, no failed handoff, no IVR that collapsed under real call volume. A stack can be “up” and still be failing customers.
What does it cost when a contact center goes down?
Costs scale fast: ITIC's 2024 survey found average downtime costs exceeding US$300,000 an hour for over 90% of mid-size and large enterprises.
How does IR Collaborate help teams see call and video quality, not just uptime?
Collaborate, powered by Prognosis, gives teams real-time visibility into call and video quality across every vendor in a UC or contact center stack, so degraded quality is visible before customers report it, including proactive testing of voice, web, and video under real-world load.
What should UC and contact center leaders in APAC know about scaling reliably?
APAC's data center pipeline hit a record 26.5GW in H1 2026, and Australian IT spending is forecast to exceed A$172.3 billion this year according to data from Cushman & Wakefield, 2026 and Gartner, 2025. That pace makes visibility into call and video quality especially important for organizations scaling interaction volume across the region.
Conclusion
Interaction volume across UC and contact center stacks will keep climbing through the rest of 2026 and beyond. For any large organization running that volume across a multi-vendor stack, visibility into call and video quality must grow at the same pace.
The organizations getting this right aren't the ones fielding the most channels. They're the ones that can say, with confidence, that every call, chat, and video session actually worked, rather than saying that the system was up.
See how IR Collaborate keeps every interaction visible.
Request a demo to see it in action.
