The Failure Demand Taxonomy
An open catalogue of the recurring defects that generate contact centre volume — what each one is, what it sounds like when a customer raises it, and which function usually owns the fix.
This is the cross-vertical core, published in full: the defects that turn up in almost every contact centre whatever the industry. Free to use, quote and build on, with attribution. No signup, no gate, no email. If you want it as a file, take the JSON.
Industry-specific taxonomies — SaaS, eCommerce, financial services, utilities — are summarised below and ship with AURA Source.
How to read it
Each entry is a defect: a recurring, nameable cause of contact, not an individual ticket. The point of a taxonomy is that two thousand differently-worded complaints about parcels marked delivered that weren’t are one defect, with one owner and one fix.
Demand type
Every entry is classified as one of three kinds of demand. You need all three to classify a whole contact stream honestly.
| Type | Meaning |
|---|---|
| failure | The contact exists because something went wrong earlier. Avoidable, and the cause usually sits outside the contact centre. |
| value | The customer wants something you exist to provide. Not a target for elimination — only for better handling. |
| context | Driven by an external obligation or a life event. Can’t be eliminated, but can usually be made less painful. |
Route signal
Flagged where the defect also carries information useful for routing the contact — because knowing which defect you’re looking at often tells you who can best resolve it. This is the seam between AURA Source and AURA Route.
Owner
The function that typically owns the underlying cause. It is deliberately not the contact centre in most cases — that’s the whole argument. Treat it as a starting hypothesis for your organisation, not a fact about it.
Why only the core is listed
The cross-vertical core is published in full because it is useful to everyone and proprietary to nobody — these defects turn up in every contact centre and naming them clearly helps the whole industry. The industry-specific taxonomies are a different matter: they are the part that takes real work to build and keeps getting sharper with use, so they ship with the product rather than the reference.
We would rather say that plainly than publish a truncated list and imply it is everything.
Using it in your own work
This is published under CC BY 4.0. You can use it in internal analysis, consultancy deliverables, research, training material or a competing product, provided you credit Centrum AURA and link back.
Suggested attribution:
Failure Demand Taxonomy, Centrum AURA — centrumaura.com/taxonomy, CC BY 4.0
Contributing
Missing a defect you see constantly? Disagree with an owner, or think a classification is wrong? Send it to hello@centrumaura.com. Corrections from practitioners are the fastest way this gets better, and contributors are credited unless they’d rather not be.
This is a public extract. It’s a working document, versioned and updated as vertical coverage grows. If you’re citing it in something durable, note the version number from the JSON.