Cold calling with AI: assistant or sales disruptor?
Content:
- Why has the topic of cold calling with AI become so hot?
- What actually happens with outgoing calls
- Legal framework: why is advertising calling by a robot prohibited in Russia
- Where outgoing calls from AI work legally and bring money
- Where AI harms: three damage mechanisms
- What practice shows: where robots break down
- How would we design a pilot without expensive mistakes?
- What to do next
Why has the topic of cold calling with AI become so hot?
laweconomics of the channel
Briefly:
to whom exactly, for what reason, and with what type of message are you going to call
What actually happens with outgoing calls
outgoing calls86% of calls from unknown numbers are not taken by people at all
34% of people say that trust in phone calls has decreased
If you look at the commercial side, cold calling for live teams rarely looks like a magic button. Vendor benchmarks for the B2B market show modest results: the conversion from conversation to meeting is calculated in units of percentages, and you still need to get through to the very fact of the conversation. This does not mean that calls are useless. This means that any tool that promises to "simply multiply the volume" should be evaluated especially harshly: in a weak channel, scaling the number of contacts does not guarantee an increase in quality.
coverage
Legal framework: why is advertising calling by a robot prohibited in Russia
Part 1 of Article 18 of the Law "On Advertising"
Part 2 of Article 18 of the same lawwithout human interventionconsent alone does not remove this prohibition.
The FAS gave a practical interpretation to this long ago in a letter dated December 26, 2019 No. DF/114009/19. Two facts are sufficient to qualify a violation under Part 2: the call was an advertising call and the means of dialing were used without human intervention. A recording of the conversation provided by the subscriber himself can be used as proof if a pre-prepared audio fragment is heard at the beginning. For businesses, this means a simple thing: a synthesized or recorded opening snippet of a conversation is not a technical detail, but a potential marker of a violation.
SovcombankIt didn't help
Part 4.1 of Article 14.3 of the Administrative Codefrom 300 thousand to 1 million rubles44.1-1 of the Law "On Communications" on mass calls
faster than the court and faster than the fine
labeling calls
advertising cold calling by a robot in Russia is not a controversial gray area, but a bad idea with clear signs of a violation.
Where outgoing calls from AI work legally and bring money
service communications
working with your database
speed-to-leadthe speed of the first response
- Reminders and confirmations
- Reactivating your own database
- Quick response to incoming lead
""There is another important thought that is often underestimated: the strongest argument in favor of an agent is not "he sounds like a human being," but "he closes 100% of the necessary touches." If live managers consistently refine 65-75% of leads, then the remaining 25-35% is already an area for automation. AI here does not so much replace the sales department as align the discipline of the process. In this mode, it can really be a profitable and safe tool.
Where AI harms: three damage mechanisms
legal
technical and reputational
commercialThe CRM contains duplicates
scales the weak point of the system
What practice shows: where robots break down
McDonald's and IBM
Taco Bell
Klarna
How would we design a pilot without expensive mistakes?
get a working and secure scriptincoming requests
The next step is to check on what legal basis the call is being made at all, and remove everything from the pilot that looks like an advertising auto—call to an unknown audience. After that, the script is built not "from scratch in imagination", but from real recordings of live conversations. This is how normal formulations, natural pauses, and the real reasons for transferring to a manager get into the script. At the beginning of the conversation, the agent should honestly introduce himself on behalf of the company and quickly lead to useful action, rather than prolong the introduction.
quick access to a person
Finally, the pilot should be evaluated not only by the beautiful numbers of dial-up and appointments. It's more important to look at the damage signals.:
- the response rate for each number and its dynamics by day;
- complaints, refusals, and the rate of immediate exclusion from the call;
- the average length of a conversation and the proportion of short calls;
- the percentage of transfers per person and the reasons for such transfers;
- held
If the pilot is built like this, the company does not have the illusion of scaling, but a manageable scheme: where the AI saves time, where it really returns money from its base, and where it needs to be stopped so as not to pay for speeding up its own mistake.
What to do next
design a pilot on one segment of the base
voice AI operator for businessAn AI agent for the sales departmenthow much does it cost to develop an AI agent?
AI in calls is not a "make cold sales cheap" button, but a tool for carefully automating those touches that are appropriate, legitimate, and really lost in the OS.
Автор
Антон Амосов
