Faayez MohammadFounder and CEO, Nexvix
Published September 20267 min read
- Latency budget
- Under about one second
- Hard requirement
- A diary with real availability
- Always
- A transfer path to a person
One: missed-call volume, counted
Get the number of calls that ring out, per week, from your telephony provider. If nobody has that number, that is the first finding, and often the whole business case.
Out-of-hours volume matters most: those calls are not competing with your staff, so the saving is unambiguous.
Two: a diary the agent can read
A voice agent that cannot see real availability can only take messages, which is a small fraction of the value. If your diary lives on paper or in one person’s head, fixing that is stage one.
Without a readable diary, a voice agent is an answering machine with better manners.
Three: latency tolerance
Voice needs a response in roughly a second. That rules out slow chains of steps mid-conversation and pushes lookups to be fast or pre-fetched. It is the main reason voice costs more to build than chat.
Four: where a caller who asks for a person goes
Every voice system must transfer on request, immediately, without an argument. Decide the destination, the hours, and what happens when nobody answers, before launch, not during.
Five: recording, consent and retention
If calls are recorded or transcribed, the caller is told, and the retention period is stated. This is a one-line policy decision that is far cheaper to make before the build than after a complaint.
Six: the greeting nobody has written
What the agent says first sets the expectation for the whole call: who it is, what it can do, and how to reach a person. Write it yourself. It is the most-heard sentence in your business.