You run forty seats. Attrition is steady, the first month of every new hire is expensive, and your best callers spend most of the day reaching people who don't answer. Someone has shown you a demo. The temptation is to think of this as a switch: the floor on one side, AI on the other.
We don't promise that AI will replace your telecallers. An agent can take repeat calls such as first contact, reminders and follow-ups. You still need people for difficult customers, for listening to calls and for improving the script. What changes over time is who does what. Here is an order that lets you find out for yourself, without betting the floor.
Step one: list your calls by type
For a week, sort what your floor does into three groups.
- Repeat and simple: reminders, confirmations, first-contact questions, document chasing.
- Repeat with judgement: qualifying a good lead, objections, a fee discussion.
- Human: hardship, complaints, a big deal, anyone upset.
Pick one job from the first group. Choose the one your callers like least, because you will get less resistance, and the one where a mistake costs least. A day-before reminder is usually a good choice. Collections on a late bucket usually isn't.
Step two: get your people onto one screen
If your floor still dials from personal mobiles, do this first, or at least alongside. The Workspace gives you recorded calls where you turn recording on, outcomes on your contacts, and numbers your business owns. It also gives you real numbers about your floor, which you will need in step five. Without them you have nothing to compare the AI against.
Step three: build one agent, and try to break it
Start from a template or Build with AI. Ask your best caller to write down what they say, and what customers say back, and put that into the script and a knowledge base. Then ask them to try to break the agent on a test call. They will, and that is the most useful hour of this project. It also makes them part of it.
A new agent is a Draft and takes test calls only. Before you go live, read the go-live guide, including what the agent says about being an AI. It doesn't bring it up by itself. If sincerely asked, it says it is a virtual assistant, and it never claims to be human.
Step four: connect the AI to your people
This is what makes it “AI plus people”. Set up a hand-over list, so when a caller needs a person, your telecaller is rung, hears a private brief while the caller is on hold, and joins the same call. Your people now start on calls that are already warm. Over time you can split them into desks by skill, hours or language.
Tell your floor what is changing and why, and be honest about what you don't yet know. People who think they are training their own replacement make poor colleagues for an agent.
Step five: judge it fairly
Run a small list. Listen to the calls. Then be careful, because the easy comparison misleads you. A person's wrap-up always sets an outcome, and an AI call gets one only from analysis, so AI only reads low until analysis has read enough calls. Analytics warns you about this. Compare on the same kind of list, in the same week. An A/B test splits one list between two agents, which is the fairest test between two AI scripts. To compare with people, run similar lists side by side.
Count the whole cost. Minutes at the voice rate, analysis if you use it, the knowledge base if the call uses it, your plan, your numbers and your supervisors' time. Then the people side: seats, attrition, training, supervision. See the pricing page for your side of it, and do the sums with your own figures. We publish no savings figure, because we don't know your floor.
Step six: widen, one job at a time
Add a second job only when the first runs without you watching every day. Each new job gets its own script, tests and a short list. Some jobs won't work out, and that is fine. If a job needs a person from the first word, keep it with your people. A power dialer for that kind of list is built and in testing, on no plan today, so don't plan around it yet.
What happens to your people
We can't answer this for you. Some floors may keep the same seats and do more, some may grow slower, and some may need different skills. The work is likely to change: more hand-overs, fewer unanswered dials, more of the hard conversations. Those can be tiring, so watch your people's load. Good callers can learn to write scripts, listen to calls and run QA, and they know your customers better than anyone. Voice practice helps people with the harder calls they will now be taking.
What doesn't move
The rules stay the same. Calls go out only from 9 am to 9 pm IST. Your Do-Not-Call list applies to AI and people alike. Consent and registry checks are still your job. This post sets out which is which. And someone must own the agent, just as someone owns a team. An agent nobody reads the calls of will drift. Give it a manager, and treat its bad calls the way you'd treat a new hire's.