Freedom Forever cuts cost per support call by 90% using ElevenLabs Agents

Freedom Forever is one of the largest U.S. residential solar installation companies, with more than 2,500 employees and a nationwide network of 10,000–20,000 independent sales representatives. The company operates multiple support lines that serve both end-customers and its contractor network, managing hundreds of thousands of customer accounts.

High call volume and seasonal demand spikes

Freedom Forever receives thousands of daily calls across customer and sales support lines, with more than 120 agents dedicated to sales support and 90 agents dedicated to customer support lines.

Demand peaks sharply in summer and slows through winter, creating major staffing fluctuations that are difficult to manage with human agents. Inconsistent call volumes led to long hold times and high call abandonment rates. On average 40% of calls were dropped before reaching an agent, with as much as 75% of inbound calls going unanswered on peak volume days. For those that did wait on hold, the time to first answer varied significantly on some days reaching as high as 25 minutes

Freedom Forever needed a more responsive and cost-efficient way to manage call volumes year-round. To improve responsiveness and deliver faster, more consistent support to both customers and sales representatives, the team began exploring conversational agents.

Choosing a unified, low-latency agents platform with integrated testing tools

Freedom Forever evaluated several Speech to Speech architectures, including OpenAI’s realtime API and custom pipelines built by combining Speech to Text, an LLM, and Text to Speech through separate APIs. These setups introduced latency and turn-taking issues, and required significant work to manage routing, scaling, and evaluations.

ElevenLabs offered a unified alternative: natural, low-latency voice interactions with built-in routing, testing, and evaluation tools that integrate directly with existing infrastructure and handle human hand-offs seamlessly. This end-to-end platform delivered both the caller experience and the operational reliability Freedom Forever needed.

From prototype to production in one week

The team prototyped within days and moved to production in a week. The constraint was not infrastructure - it was selecting which scenarios to automate first.

In production, Freedom Forever runs inbound support for both its contractor network and customer base. A router agent identifies the caller type and directs them to specialized agents equipped to handle their requests. Calls are managed through Twilio numbers connected directly to ElevenLabs Agents, with seamless transfers to human representatives when needed and transcript context automatically posted to the CRM. The system operates in English and Spanish, including support for Puerto Rico dialects.

We replaced 25-minute wait times with instant answers and cut our cost per call by 90%, while reducing headcount by over 50%. With peak season approaching, ElevenLabs gives us the performance, reliability, and built-in testing and evaluation tools to handle higher volumes and deliver instant support without scaling headcount – Rob Richardson, VP of Product at Freedom Forever

90% cost reduction and instant support response

Freedom Forever reduced cost per call by 90%, cut its support team in half from 210 to 100 agents, eliminated hold times, and brought call abandonment rates down from 40% to nearly zero after migrating to ElevenLabs Agents.

What’s next

In addition to transforming customer support, Freedom Forever is exploring outbound sales agents to help its independent sales network engage leads faster and follow up on customer inquiries more efficiently.