Is there anything more frustrating than calling a company and only reaching voicemail, with no way to get a response? Or dealing with an AI system that offers nonsensical answers or no help at all, leaving you stuck? Customer support shouldn’t be that difficult. That’s why Specialty Answering Service (SAS) introduced Joy—our front-end AI agent capable of handling calls and transferring them to live agents when necessary. It offers users the efficiency of AI combined with the empathy and understanding of a human.
A New Kind of Customer Experience
Imagine calling your plumber and leaving a voicemail that might never get heard. Instead, with Joy, you’re greeted by an AI agent that follows the same script a live agent would. It can handle tasks such as dispatching emergency calls to the on-call plumber—provided that option is in their script. If your needs go beyond the AI’s capabilities, Joy seamlessly transfers you to a human agent to complete the call. Any information you’ve already provided (like your name or the nature of your emergency) is shared with the live agent, so you don’t have to repeat yourself.
Hybrid Flexibility
This experience goes beyond traditional telephone answering services in fundamental ways. If you prefer not to use AI for any calls, you can opt for a fully human-based approach. If you’d like the AI to handle some calls—say, routine message-taking—while humans handle more urgent or complex situations, that’s easy to configure. In our hybrid system, you’re never locked into one method, and your customers will appreciate having a choice.
By configuring the Specialty Answering Service Flex workflow builder, you can decide exactly how you want calls to be managed. The result is a single workflow that both AI and human agents can use, ensuring consistency across all interactions.
Avoid Losing Customers
If callers only speak with AI and don’t get the information they need quickly, they might lose patience and hang up, taking their business elsewhere. That’s a missed opportunity. By combining AI with human agents, you can provide instant answers for straightforward calls while still offering a human touch for more complex issues.
We’re bringing AI answering service technology directly to small businesses so they don’t have to juggle multiple providers for live operators and AI. We know that great customer service is about offering options.
Why We Built an AI Agent
Your customers need answers in the way that suits them best, and businesses need the most efficient way to manage customer needs.
- Simple Transactions: AI is perfect for quick tasks such as collecting a caller’s name, email address, or the reason for calling.
- Complex Queries: Some calls, like processing orders or handling returns, are more complicated. In these cases, human agents excel at navigating the nuances.
A few months ago, Specialty Answering Service began testing our AI agent, Joy, and saw immediate benefits. Joy handled hundreds of calls per day with great success. Billable time was often 20% lower than with calls handled solely by live operators. From our pilot program, we gained valuable insights into what customers expect and how to improve our tool before rolling it out to all clients.
Initially, our AI agent had a static greeting and could only capture basic information like name and call reason. The production version, however, follows your custom call script just like a human agent. Joy AI will transform how small businesses outsource their customer service by combining AI and live agents in one system. Your customers won’t have to learn a new way to communicate—they can simply choose what works best for them.
How We Built It
Joy is built using the same core technologies we already rely on for live agent calls: Twilio, Amazon, and Google. To enable AI functionality, we integrated OpenAI into our technology stack. OpenAI analyzes call transcriptions in real time to make decisions and help our native systems properly log data.
If the AI agent asks a caller for their name and the transcription isn’t crystal clear, OpenAI helps interpret what was said. If there’s low confidence in the data, Joy will politely ask the caller to repeat themselves. For example, if the caller spells their name in a complicated way, OpenAI bridges the gap between the imperfect transcription and the caller’s intended response.
All this processing happens in fractions of a second while the caller is on the line. Our infrastructure and techniques are designed for speed, so hundreds of calls can be handled simultaneously without lag.
Give Customers What They Need
Rethinking the inbound phone experience makes both business and customer service sense. Joy works alongside our live operator service to provide instant answers via AI, and human interaction whenever necessary. This makes it easier for businesses to adopt AI without having to research multiple vendors.
Give your customers the service they want, exactly when they want it! Sign up for a free trial of our AI answering service today!
