A guide to set up outbound AI voice agent for customer service
An outbound AI voice agent is software that places phone calls on a business's behalf, using speech recognition and generative AI to hold a real conversation instead of playing a fixed script. This guide walks through setting up an outbound AI voice agent end to end, using the AC service follow-up example throughout, and covers how to tell whether the calls are actually working once they're live.…
An outbound AI voice agent is a software that makes phone calls on a business's behalf, using speech recognition and generative AI to engage in a real conversation. This guide outlines the process of setting up an outbound AI voice agent end to end, using a specific example of a post-service re-engagement call.
An outbound AI voice agent differs from an inbound agent, which answers incoming calls, and from traditional IVR or auto-dialers, which play fixed menus or pre-recorded messages. Common use cases include appointment reminders, billing follow-ups, post-service surveys, and lead outreach.
In the provided example, the post-service re-engagement call is triggered when a field team rejects a customer's service request. Instead of the request sitting unresolved, the outbound AI voice agent calls the customer to confirm if the service is still needed or if it has been handled another way. This low-stakes, structured, and high-volume use case is ideal for testing outbound AI voice agents.
Before setting up the agent, two prerequisites are needed: a phone number for the agent to call from, connected through a SIP trunk or Twilio Elastic SIP Trunk, and clear agent instructions, including the opening line, the call's goal, and how the agent should respond if the customer asks for a human.
The setup guide, which is platform-agnostic, outlines the following steps:
1. Connect a phone number and create the agent within DronaHQ's voice agent builder.
2. Configure the agent by setting up the voice model, transcriber model, LLM model, and agent instructions. Provide clear, explicit instructions for each possible customer response to avoid the agent getting stuck or repeating itself.
3. Add the necessary tools for the agent to access customer data or receive call outcomes, such as webhooks or connected tools. Connect at least one destination before launching the campaign.
4. Run a campaign by setting up the campaign name, selecting the phone number to call from, choosing the agent, uploading a CSV of contacts, mapping CSV columns to expected variables, enabling auto-retry for unanswered calls, setting a timezone and calling window, and ensuring the agent is published.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
