A support workflow is not resilient merely because an agent can draft a reply offline. The review must show how a request is captured, prioritized, owned, protected, and reconciled when customers, agents, or the main routing system lose connectivity. Use synthetic cases and planned interruptions so no real customer is used as a test subject.
Map every connectivity dependency
Trace each intake channel from customer submission to an owned queue: email, website form, chat, phone, social, marketplace, and monitoring alert. Identify where a network connection is required, which component buffers work, how long it retains it, and what evidence confirms delivery. A browser showing “sent” is not enough if the routing system never accepted the request.
For each support location, record primary and alternate connectivity, power dependency, authentication requirements, and whether staff can reach the authoritative ticket list during an outage. Include remote agents and mobile devices, not just the main office.
NIST's contingency-planning overview describes coordinated plans, procedures, and technical measures for recovering systems, operations, and data after disruption. It includes short-term manual processing as one possible alternate method. A paper or local worksheet can be a fallback, but only if access, privacy, ownership, and later reconciliation are defined.
Establish a normal queue baseline
Use the same reporting period, filters, and time zone before and after the exercise. Record assigned and unassigned work, queue priority, longest wait, agent availability, transfers, reopened cases, and the age of the oldest active request. Microsoft’s record-routing queue report includes priority, assigned and unassigned work, longest wait, and agents online.
Review individual high-priority and old cases rather than trusting averages. Define outage triggers from the team's normal workload and service obligations. Examples include the intake endpoint becoming unreachable, acknowledgements stopping, unassigned work exceeding the accepted range, or the authoritative queue being unavailable.
Test the customer side first
Create clearly marked synthetic requests from a slow connection, an intermittently disconnected phone, and a fully offline device where the channel claims to queue submission. Record whether the user receives an accurate state: saved locally, sending, accepted, failed, or needs retry. Do not display a definitive confirmation before the authoritative system has accepted the request unless the wording clearly describes local storage.
Reconnect repeatedly and confirm each test request arrives once. Preserve the client identifier and server ticket identifier so duplicates can be detected. Test attachments separately because they often have different size, retry, and retention behavior.
Exercise the agent fallback
Interrupt the routing system in a test environment or isolate a controlled test queue. Confirm who declares manual mode, where new work is recorded, how priority is marked, who owns each entry, how duplicates are prevented, and how sensitive details are protected. Keep the fallback small enough to audit.
Microsoft’s unified routing queue guidance explains that queues collect and distribute cases and conversations using assignment methods, availability, priority, and capacity. A manual fallback must replace those decisions explicitly. “Agents watch the inbox” is not a complete assignment rule.
Test handoff between shifts while the main system remains unavailable. A new agent should be able to identify urgent work, next action, and customer contact history without private copies spreading across personal devices. Define an approved alternate communication path for the support team.
Reconnect and reconcile
When service returns, freeze broad edits long enough to compare the fallback log with the authoritative queue. Import or re-enter records using stable identifiers. For each request, confirm current owner, priority, status, timestamps, reply history, and whether the customer received duplicate communication. Mark the fallback entry reconciled only after the server record is verified.
Observe delayed rules, notifications, and retries. A sudden reconnect may release old messages or trigger several assignment cycles. Microsoft documents that unassigned work can return to a queue when no representative matches or is available; inspect the oldest and highest-impact items after recovery.
Record decisions and limits
Measure detection time, manual-mode activation, unrecorded requests, duplicate rate, time to reconcile, longest wait, and unresolved items. Record which channels were truly usable and which merely cached a screen. Assign owners and dates for weak confirmations, missing identifiers, inaccessible fallbacks, privacy gaps, and untested attachments.
A passing review shows that a request can survive disconnection, remain visibly pending or confirmed, obtain an accountable owner through a controlled fallback, and reconcile once without loss or duplication. Low-connectivity support is a continuity process, not simply an offline checkbox.
Sources
- Contingency planning — National Institute of Standards and Technology, June 22, 2020
- View and understand real-time analytics for record routing in the queue report — Microsoft Learn, June 26, 2026
- Create and manage queues for unified routing — Microsoft Learn
- Assignment methods in unified routing — Microsoft Learn, July 18, 2025