I discovered Retell a few weeks ago and quickly built and began testing an outbound calling agent for appointment setting. Currently split testing Leland and Cimo and having some good results.
Where Retell is currently winning is its ability to do 20 calls at once and allows me to call my house list of about 1200 contacts in nothing flat whereas before a live agent’s results were nominal at best. For the most part most calls are unanswered or get sent to decision maker voicemail. So just getting through the rough to get to the diamonds is an accomplishment. These calls are B2B so calls are answered by receptionist or IVR. Hitting a lot of voicemails to Retell shines in a swift pivot from receptionist to decisionmaker (vm). The voicemail generates return calls, prospects visiting website and completing a form to schedule. The pre-call stuff - tagging crm contacts to call and feeding that to Retell via API and Google Sheets AppScript is solid. Post call outcomes being fed back to crm also solid ( where post actions take place via Zapier or other Sheets Script.)
Where my Retell implementation is limping (and where I’d like some input) is when the calls are transferred and the decision maker answers live. While it has resulted in a few live scheduled appointments this falls into mostly two negatives- 1. feedback from the contact asking if “its a computer, ai, a robot etc” (not common) and 2. The agent getting tangled up in the logic in finding a date and time to scheduled either offered to the contact or suggested by the contact- for this reason…in addition to accessing booked appointment dates and times in Google (Calendar / Cal.com) - the date/time must also be qualified geographically available as we visit the contact not vice versa. So the offered/suggested date must be when we are in the contact’s (COUNTY) (Available on called contact’s variable AND attached to all event contacts) and then the date and time must be open as well. Some days are completely open and any contact could book it. Then throw in the contact may say, “We can only do Tuesday afternoon” (for example) and it’s not long before the agent is going in circles looking for open times- sometime suggesting dates and times that turn out to be unavailable geographically. And I still can’t figure out why the agent may offer something like, (for example): “Thursday July 17” when that is clearly a Friday.
So see how that is a mess?
So I’m definitely encouraged but want to get over this one hurdle. I’ve always said, “When in doubt, ‘think like the software’.” So maybe some of you have some experience with something similar and could suggest a different way to approach this.
Thank you!