What is AI calling? Inbound, outbound, and customer support

Customer support is an organization’s front line, providing a first point of contact for customers whenever they need help. Whether it’s to find the right resources or to troubleshoot an issue, millions of calls flow into customer call centers every year.

Gartner predicts that by 2030, the call center market will reach $741.7 billion in market value. Part of what’s accelerating growth in this field is the rise of new technologies, with AI calling becoming a central part of call centers around the globe. In fact, predictions suggest that artificial intelligence will reduce labor costs in these spaces by as much as $80 billion, while supporting scaling and expansion.

Beyond just inbound support, implementing AI calls into outbound processes can also improve sales processes and support your agents in their day-to-day workflows. In this article, we’ll explore what AI calling is, touching on how AI voice agents work and how businesses can use them to support their customers.

Summary

• AI calling uses artificial intelligence to receive or place phone calls, holding natural conversations with customers.
• AI calling pipelines combine four components: speech to text, a large language model, text to speech, and telephony and deployment channels.
• AI calling outperforms legacy IVR systems and provides an intuitive customer experience.
• Using an AI call center system can radically reduce costs, with AI agents being 9x cheaper than human agents for routine calls.
• Customers like Klarna have achieved 10x faster resolutions with AI call systems, radically improving customer support resolution rates.

What is AI calling?

AI calling is the use of artificial intelligence technology to receive or make a call and have a conversation with a person. An AI agent will greet the caller, discussing what they need and how it can be of service. For inbound calls, that might mean connecting callers with a customer support rep or directing them to certain resources.

An important distinction between AI calling and older IVR technology is that the former is able to understand conversation in real time and respond. Instead of working through a preset menu selection of options, AI calling agents adapt to human conversation and bring in related information to help. 

When paired with high-volume customer support call centers, an AI phone call system can significantly decrease the workload on your human agents. For Klarna, integrating AI calling with ElevenAgents offered 10x faster resolutions, providing a convenient way of accessing support for their 35 million customers.

Businesses can also use AI calling to facilitate outbound calls. As these systems understand human language and can adapt in real time, they perform better than automated robocalls.

How does AI calling work?

From the moment you speak your first word to an AI agent, numerous processes run in the background to make sure the reply is timely, accurate, logical, and useful to your conversation. 

AI calling uses four main components:

• Speech to text: When you speak, a Speech to Text model captures your words and converts them into text. Advanced STT systems can identify other elements of language, like punctuation or different accents, as well as distinguishing between different speakers.
• Large language model (LLM): An LLM component processes the text and then uses the interpreted understanding provided by the NLU layer to determine what an appropriate response would be. It draws on extensive learned patterns and queries internal systems to retrieve any relevant information and deliver it in a contextually aware way.
• Text to speech (TTS): After generating a text response, an AI caller still needs to actually speak the words back to the caller. The agent uses a Text to Speech component to generate a response in a natural-sounding voice. Leading voice agents have the ability to closely match the tone and emotional range of a human speaker.
• Telephony and deployment channels: While the other three components handle the conversation itself, telephony and deployment channels actually get the call to the agent and the agent’s voice back to the caller. Telephony integrations (SIP trunking, dedicated phone numbers, or connections into your existing contact center) route inbound and outbound calls, while deployment options determine whether the agent lives on a phone line, in an app, or across web and messaging channels.

All of this happens in the blink of an eye. Systems optimized for latency can complete these stages in under a second, with leading end-to-end processing taking around ~680ms for P50. While presented as four distinct components here, these processes typically overlap to help reduce the time it takes to produce a vocal response.

Inside the ElevenAgents platform for AI calling

ElevenAgents brings the components covered above together into a single platform. Voice creation shapes how your agent sounds, Agent Workflows define how it reasons throughout a conversation, and a real-time analytics dashboard shows how it performs in production. 

These all connect to the telephony layer that carries calls to and from the agent.

Telephony and deployment

Telephony turns an agent from something you test in a browser into something that can take phone calls, inbound or outbound, at scale. 

ElevenAgents supports two main paths to get a number connected to your agent:

• Native integration: A number purchased through a provider like Twilio supports both inbound and outbound calls, while a verified caller ID supports outbound only and is not assignable to an agent for inbound. This is a useful option for teams who want a phone number provisioned and running quickly without managing their own telephony stack. 
• SIP trunking: For teams with an existing Private Branch Exchange (PBX) or carrier relationship, you can route calls to an agent without replacing the underlying infrastructure. You’ll work with providers like Twilio and Telnyx to implement standard SIP, supporting both inbound and outbound calls on the same trunk.

For outbound calling, the Batch calling feature allows you to upload a recipient list (CSV or XLS), personalize each call with dynamic variables like a customer’s name or appointment time, assign an agent to handle the calls, and send the batch either immediately or on a schedule. 

Batch calling helps to transform multi-day dialing projects into something an agent could handle overnight.

Once a call is live, agents can also transfer to a human over the phone system when a caller needs one, using Agent Workflows’ transfer-to-number nodes.

Voice, conversation logic, and analytics

Alongside the phone connection itself, three other layers shape how an agent sounds and behaves while in a call:

• Voice creation: When selecting an agent voice, you can draw from the library of 10,000+ voices, plus options of cloning your own voice. Expressive Mode adds real-time tone adaptation on top.
• Conversation logic: You can map a conversation as a visual graph rather than one large prompt with Agents Workflows. It routes to specialized subagents by intent, calls tools with defined success and failure paths, and can also escalate to a human agent when needed. 
• Analytics: ElevenLabs delivers advanced analytics via the Agents Platform dashboard. It offers insight into call outcomes, cost, duration, and error rate, filterable by agent, language, and call type. You can use the  workflow view to overlay that data on the conversation graph, showing exactly where callers get stuck or drop off.

Across these high-level elements, ElevenAgents delivers an end-to-end system for both outbound and inbound calling.

What are the benefits of AI calling?

An AI calling agent doesn’t replace human call center employees, but it takes on the volume of routine calls that would otherwise bottleneck them (both on the inbound and outbound sides). 

Inbound, the agent receives the call, determines what the caller needs, and resolves it or escalates the call to the right person. Outbound, it can proactively dial a list of contacts to qualify leads, confirm appointments, run reminders, or solicit information, all without a human placing a  single call. 

In practice, this leads to faster completion of outbound campaigns, since a list that would take a team days to work through could be dialed in hours, and helps businesses deliver faster resolutions on inbound, since customers never have to wait in a queue to reach an agent who can help them. For example, eDreams ODIEGO used ElevenAgents to replace rigid phone trees with conversational voice agents across five languages, seeing double-digit improvements in resolution speed and transfer rate.

Alongside faster response times, there are numerous benefits of using an AI call center operator for both directions of traffic.

24/7 availability

Human agents have fixed working hours, creating a window of activity that callers can use to get support. Especially for companies that operate internationally by only having a local customer care team, that could mean that your users have no one to talk to for a significant period of the day.

AI calling agents solve this issue as they’re able to field calls around the clock. 

No matter whether it’s the weekend or late at night, your customers only need to pick up their phone and call to receive agent attention. On the outbound side, it means campaigns aren’t bound to business hours either: agents can reach leads across time zones and work through a call list overnight, meaning your human team comes online to a prioritized list of leads and appointments.

Consistent quality at scale

According to recent research, 72% of U.S. consumers would pay more for a premium customer service experience. Quality here is defined by a few core metrics, like attentiveness and the ability to quickly resolve an issue. 

Alongside high fees when training customer support staff, it’s only natural that human agents feel tired by the end of their shifts and can’t always provide their best possible service. That same fatigue impacts an outbound rep making their hundredth call of the day.

Researchers train AI call systems to specifically exhibit all of the characteristics that would make a customer rate an interaction as high quality. Every inbound conversation gets the same degree of warmth and diligence, while every outbound call delivers the same accurate pitch and compliant script.

AI agents deliver consistent quality at scale, leaving your customers in safe hands for both inbound and outbound calling. 

Cost reduction

Cost per Resolution (CPR) is a metric that benchmarks how much it costs for a company to fully resolve a customer issue. The CPR of human agents is significantly higher than that of AI calling systems, meaning that you’re able to save money on every call that AI agents resolve. The same principle applies to outbound operations: cost per qualified lead or per completed appointment reminder falls when an agent, rather than human representatives, places the call. 

Recent data suggests that the cost per human interaction is $4.50, while the cost per AI interaction is only $0.50, representing significant operational cost reductions.

But the real efficiency comes from more than the lower per-call cost. AI agents also eliminate the need for human involvement in a  significant share of customer interactions, reducing the overall volume of expensive, human-handled calls.

For example, 100,000 calls at the $4.50 human cost interaction would cost $450,000 with no automation. If AI agents resolve 50% of that volume at $0.50 per call, the total cost falls to $250,000: $25,000 for the AI-handled half and $225,000 for the human-handled half. That represents a saving of $200,000, or roughly 44%, while resolving the same number of customer interactions.

Scalable AI calling

Artificial intelligence call agents can run a number of concurrent conversations. While a human agent is limited to a 1:1 discussion, AI agents can field an inbound spike or launch an entire outbound campaign to thousands of contacts simultaneously, without any single conversation slowing the others down.

Especially in moments of peak demand or when a campaign has a tight goal to hit, the ability to scale up instantly is both an operational benefit and one that improves the experience for whoever’s on the other end of the call.

Even when faced with seasonal peaks or high campaign-launch volume, your calls go out and get answered without long queues.

The role of AI voice calls in modern customer service

Customer service is one of the most widely used applications of AI voice calls, allowing enterprises to automate inbound and outbound calls at scale. Instead of waiting for a human agent to be free to take a call, an AI agent is ready to answer the call, understand a customer’s needs, and direct them to the right information. If there is a task that the AI voice caller cannot solve, it may also have an escalation process to move the caller to a human agent.

AI calling helps improve customer service by:

• Solving routine calls: Many incoming customer service calls are routine tasks like finding information or filling out default forms. When connected to an internal knowledge base, AI systems solve these routine problems without needing to escalate to human agents.
• Freeing up customer support agent hours: With routine calls managed by AI, your customer support agents are able to spend their time on high-value or complex cases. AI agents save their time while helping to make sure only the most in-need customers are connected to human agents.
• Reducing wait times: Instead of having to wait until a human agent becomes free, AI call systems are able to receive an incoming call and get started on solving the customer’s problem.

From financial services to healthcare providers, embedding an AI voice agent into your customer service call center can remove strain from human agents and improve customer satisfaction.

What do AI calls sound like? ElevenLabs examples in action

Voice-based agents have been a part of call centers for decades. If you’ve ever interacted with a system that’s asked you to press a certain button or speak a word to follow a conversation pathway, that isn’t an AI caller. Instead, you were interacting with an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. As you’ll likely be familiar with, IVRs are highly robotic and unpleasant to work with. 

AI calling agents are a world apart from these, using neural TTS voices and large language models to generate human-like speech in real-time. Rather than just using a static script, they can creatively build a conversational workflow while you talk to it, allowing you interact with a warm, friendly voice. 

ElevenAgents offers AI calling models with extensive emotional range, a full stack of integrated tools and conversation logic, and the ability to converse in over 30 languages.

ElevenAgents’ Expressive Mode takes this a step further, letting agents adapt tone in real time. An agent could respond more calmly to a frustrated customer or with urgency when speed matters. Create an agent with ElevenAgents today to get started.

Get started with ElevenAgents for seamless voice calling

From accelerating time-to-resolution in call centers to supporting your sales team at scale, AI calling systems can save company time and resources.

ElevenAgents is a full-stack platform for building, managing, refining, and deploying AI voice agents at scale. Across voice creation, telephony integration, conversation logic, and analytics, ElevenAgents can enhance your inbound customer service and outbound lead qualification. 

Discover how other businesses have already used ElevenAgents to improve their workflows. Or get started by contacting sales and creating your own agent today. 

AI calling FAQ