Brokers and other logistics companies with a high volume of incoming calls tend to rely on tedious automated phone navigation menus and are often forced to leave customers on hold for more complex issues. With a sophisticated AI voice agent, many of those calls can now be solved without needing a transfer.
David Bell, founder and CEO of CloneOps.ai, recognized the value of a powerful AI tool that could help streamline call centers and customer support operations.
“When I first saw AI being used for solutions in the logistics industry, I knew I had to understand how it would impact my business and what I could do to get involved with the future,” Bell said.
“What customers need now is simple,” Bell said. “They want to know how we’re going to help them save money and help their employees work better. That’s what I’m focusing on at CloneOps.ai.”
With his team at CloneOps.ai, Bell is building a voiced AI platform that will make employees in the U.S. and in nearshore call centers more productive and more valuable.
“Most of our competitors are from a primarily tech background, but our decades of experience in logistics sets us apart,” Bell said. “There are professionals who blow me away with how tech-savvy they are, but my experience in logistics and the tech skills on my team combine to make a product that’s tailored for what logistics companies need.”
Just as important as technical knowledge is the relational aspect of the freight industry. According to Bell, successfully launching a new integrated tool comes down to trust.
“We need full integrations to get all the data points that we need, and to get all of those integrations you really need to be a trusted partner,” Bell explained. “Anyone who knows logistics knows that proprietary data is very sacred to the companies who have spent a lot of time and resources developing their data models.
“Coming from a career where I’ve hauled freight for more than 25 years, consolidated broker freight throughout the country and partnered with many of these companies in their nearshoring efforts, I have great relationships and credibility among this community. I couldn’t be undertaking this new effort at CloneOps.ai without that trust and credibility in the logistics space.”
CloneOps’ AI voice agent integrates into existing systems cleanly and easily. Users can give the virtual agent a custom voice, provide it with prompts and scripts for various scenarios, and integrate it into any necessary systems.
Because the virtual agent relies on the relevant data, callers feed it whatever may be necessary for typical calls – information such as load specifics, delivery and accounts receivable data, invoices, and payables.
“The virtual agent takes the info from your system or an uploaded CSV and summarizes it or answers questions about it verbally like a person would,” Bell said. “As long as you have the data, you can train the agent like you would any other employee to speak to that data and have a dynamic conversation.”
According to Bell, CloneOps.ai’s virtual agent is much more advanced and convenient than traditional systems in which users have to navigate menus with prewritten scripts prior to reaching a representative.
“We’re building our agent to be interactive so that you can avoid a lot of those scenarios where you’d need to transfer a call,” Bell said. “In our case, you can jump right in and take over at any point with a human agent, whereas our competitors still rely on menus that force the customer to transfer the call.”
From the CloneOps.ai dashboard, users can take over any call manually and interrupt the AI agent. “No one likes to deal with being on hold during the transfer process,” Bell said. “That defeats the purpose. The main benefit of using an AI agent like ours is so that people don’t have to be on hold.”
Having experience and relationships with people all over the industry, Bell was poised to figure out exactly what the big brokers need.
“You have to continually evolve in this space to remain competitive,” he said. “If it’s going to cut your cost or make your people more productive, you have to look at what solutions are right for your business. If you deal with a high volume of calls that require straightforward information requests, it’s an indispensable tool.”
The CloneOps AI agent is immensely scalable, since it essentially operates as one liaison that can handle multiple calls instead of leaving numerous callers on hold. Often, the AI agent can solve the problem without needing an employee to be involved.
Additionally, Bell said, one of the most important features of the CloneOps AI agent is that it can identify the caller and prioritize based on urgency.
“If you have your best customer calling, you don’t want them in the queue behind four unknowns or potential customers,” Bell said. “When a major carrier calls to get a bill paid, you don’t want that person sitting on hold. A huge percentage of calls at high-volume brokers sit on hold or go unanswered.”
To check out the CloneOps virtual AI agent, visit CloneOps.ai to book a demo today.
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