Handling Call Volume?

October 22, 2025

by a searcher from Boston University in Albuquerque, NM, USA

Hello world! I am running a services business and have a question about handling call volume. We transitioned from landlines to Dialpad a little over 6 weeks ago and are finally getting analytics on our call volumes. We get between###-###-#### calls a day and they often come in waves. I've set a goal to be above 90% answer rate and we can sometimes achieve that but I'd like to know if anyone else has experience in tackling this problem. Adding CSR team members is more overhead. AI is the promised future but has anyone actually implemented something like that? Local or international call centers are an option but I'm concerned about quality of agents and our company losing that "hometown" vibe to customers. Would love to speak with those in the home services space about whats working for them.

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Reply by an investor
in Valley Center, CA, USA

We built a small offshore contact center to supplement and "compete" with our in-office contact center stateside and ran them side by side. We sourced high quality English speakers and managed them in house through a professional platform called Five9. This allowed us to provide material, training, oversight, and quality control. We found that the offshore team outperformed our on site team in almost every metric including customer satisfaction, sales close rates, attendance and employee satisfaction. The only place they lagged was in call volume. Their patience with clients on the phone and willingness to thoroughly complete the aftercall work led to productivity rates that were about 40% below our onshore people but at 1/4 of the cost and with all other metrics being comparable or even better it made a lot of sense. We diversified where we hired from a geographic perspective to avoid downtime on a mass scale which may be caused by something happening in a specific geography (typhoons, earthquakes, political upheaval, holidays etc). It was a great move for us and we slowly transitioned to 90% of our team overseas. AI has the potential to be a game changer today. The jury is still out on how customers will receive it- at least in the near term. Over the course of time, I don't think there is any question that it will be adopted almost universally but in the meantime, building an offshore call center may require less upfront capital, produce better results and be easier to create than you might imagine.

Reply by a searcher
from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, USA

I worked in the contact center industry for a long time, the "hometown vibe" really just translates to "employees who care". I haven't checked in on front desk Ai agents in a while, but I've heard they have come a long way in a short time. You hit on the biggest problem in all CS function: call volume isn't level, there are spikes/waves. How do you flatten demand to avoid wasted staff time off-peak. If I were my business or working to help someone set this up I would do this: 1. Write out the customer experience you want as a workflow 2. See what tools exist to automate each step 3. plug in people only where you need a human. 4. Set some KPIs for each step and test it out for a few months Happy to chat more.

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