Avoiding Long Hotline Wait Times
How to set up shorter hotline queues in your company with AI phone agents
How your customers perceive the current situation
When customers call your company, they expect someone to pick up the phone no matter what time it is and to get an answer. Of course, it can happen that no employee is available to answer the phone on public holidays or outside business hours. In principle, there is nothing wrong with that.
But even then, there is the option of using an AI assistant that asks the caller about the reason for their call, for example. It can then tell them that their request has been noted and that an employee will call back during business hours. This gives customers the impression that their concern is being taken care of.
With long hotline wait times, however, the caller is usually already annoyed. When they then hear a voice on the phone telling them they are number 12 in the queue and that it will probably take another 45 minutes because others are ahead of them, they get even more frustrated than before.
And when they finally get through and your support employee asks questions read off a script lying in front of them, the customer becomes even more frustrated and would rather just hang up, even though their problem is a very simple one. One solution would be to use an AI phone agent instead of a long queue with waiting positions.
The agent first asks the caller what their request is, ideally already trained on the company's knowledge so it can resolve simple issues directly. This lets you reduce the queue significantly or eliminate it entirely. On top of that, phone agents can take all calls in parallel.
If the phone agent does not know how to proceed, it can refer the caller to an employee and simply put them through. Otherwise, it can tell the caller that it will create a ticket for their request and that a colleague will call back.
How you can set up your first AI phone agent today
Anyone who wants to set up an AI phone agent in their company today has several options to choose from. You can use either ElevenLabs or Vapi. These are the basic building blocks of AI phone agents. There you can create an agent directly, choose a voice, and select the languages it should be able to speak. Optionally, you can upload an audio recording of your own voice so that the phone agent speaks in your voice during the call. You can give it a script to follow along with a set of rules. You can also give it knowledge in the form of documents and PDF files or connect it to a RAG system.
Next, you can buy a phone number through Twilio if you do not have one yet. To do so, you simply upload your commercial register entry to Twilio and can then buy phone numbers there (for example a German number) that you can use for your AI phone agent. If you already have a phone number listed on your website where customers can call you, or if you have a hotline number, you do not have to change it. You can simply forward your current number to the AI phone agent's number, and it will take the calls.
An AI phone agent can take several calls in parallel without any problem. This means the AI phone agent can handle several of your customer calls at the same time. You can also specify in the script that your phone agent should forward the call to an external number for certain questions, such as "I would like to cancel my order", so that it ends up with your second level support within the company.
That means you can build your own support structure. The AI phone agent works at first level and one of your employees at second level. With that, you have successfully set up your first AI phone agent in your company, and from now on you can save your employees a considerable amount of time, because they are only called in from second level onwards while everything else is handled by the phone agent.
