Introduction
Your support team is faced with the same questions on the phone every day – "What is the status of my order?", "How can I reset my password?". Such routine inquiries take time, block the lines, and leave customers stuck in queues. Wouldn't it be great to automate these routine inquiries? In this blog post, you'll learn how AI on the phone makes this possible: it answers common questions within seconds, relieves your team, and ensures happier customers.
Routine Inquiries on the Phone – A Time Wasters in Customer Service
Many companies struggle with a flood of routine calls. Customers want simple information, but every call must be answered by a human. This causes waiting times and ties up resources that are missing elsewhere. Classic telephone support is also difficult to scale – a high volume of calls often leads to long waiting lines or significantly higher personnel costs. These problems lead to missed opportunities, dissatisfied customers, and stressed employees:
Staff Shortages: Outside of core working hours, there often aren't enough employees available to handle a high volume of calls. A single support staff member can only handle one call at a time, and finding new employees is costly.
Long Waiting Times: When all lines are busy, customers are frustrated and stuck in endless loops or encounter busy signals. Important inquiries are lost as a result.
Limited Scalability: During sudden spikes (e.g., during outages or marketing campaigns), human teams quickly reach their limits. Providing additional staff is expensive and time-consuming, and overloading leads to a decline in service quality.
All of this diminishes the service experience. Customers today expect quick, available help at any time – but with traditional means this is hardly manageable. This is where artificial intelligence comes into play.
Solution: AI Phone Assistant smao Automates Routine Inquiries
This is where the AI phone assistant smao comes in. The vision behind it: to automate routine communication so that your team is relieved and can focus on more complex tasks – all efficiently and 100% data protection compliant. smao takes incoming calls as the first point of contact and answers common questions fully automatically. No call goes unanswered anymore – when a call comes in, the digital assistant responds immediately. In real time, the AI recognizes the caller's concern, analyzes their words and intentions. The system independently answers frequent or simple questions based on a stored knowledge database – standard inquiries can thus be resolved within seconds.
More complex cases are intelligently forwarded: If the AI recognizes that specific expertise is needed, it directs the call to the right contact person in the team. smao passes all relevant information from the previous conversation to this person – if desired, even as an automatically created ticket with a summary of the conversation – to ensure no information is lost and the customer does not have to explain their issue again. Through this smart division of labor, your support team can work efficiently with AI: the system filters out routine inquiries and resolves them autonomously, while employees focus on more demanding problems.
The result is faster resolution times and more satisfied customers.
The implementation is straightforward: the cloud-based platform of smao integrates into your existing software landscape within minutes. Through one-click connections to over 50 common systems – from CRM and ticket systems to knowledge databases – call data, tickets, and information flow seamlessly into your workflows. Therefore, your employees can continue working in their familiar tools as before, while the AI assistant takes over routine tasks in the background.
Practical Examples: AI on the Phone in Action
What does this look like in practice? An example comes from the IT industry: System houses often have to guarantee 24/7 support, which is hardly manageable in terms of personnel. With the AI assistant from smao, they remain reachable around the clock – without expensive night shifts or weekend work. In doing so, smao automates and reliably handles routine tasks such as taking reports of faults, asking initial diagnostic questions, or directing calls to the appropriate specialist on the technical team. If a problem escalates outside office hours, the assistant first collects all important information and passes it on to the emergency service, ensuring no urgent distress call goes unanswered.
Other industries also benefit from automated phone assistance. In healthcare – such as doctor’s offices with high call volumes – AI can answer routine inquiries or coordinate appointments. In retail and e-commerce, customer inquiries regarding orders, delivery status, or opening hours are automatically answered without the need for a team member to intervene. And in industry, the phone assistant supports technical support for machines and devices by resolving common questions independently or forwarding calls to the appropriate experts. Wherever many calls come in daily, an AI phone assistant provides enormous relief. Companies of all sizes have the opportunity to scale and professionalize their customer service without the costs exploding.
GDPR Compliance and DE Hosting: Trustworthy Automation
In customer service, the rule is: no trust, no success. Therefore, data protection is a top priority for AI solutions. smao was developed in Germany, and the platform operates fully GDPR compliant, so companies don’t have to worry about compliance with data protection regulations. All conversations and data are processed in accordance with the strict requirements of the GDPR – a decisive advantage over some other solutions, where uncertainty about data processing exists. Furthermore, the solution is hosted in German data centers, ensuring that sensitive customer information does not leave the EU data protection area. Your company thus retains full control over all support data. Automation goes hand in hand with data security here – you can implement AI on the phone confidently.
Conclusion: Achieving More Efficient Customer Service with AI Phone Assistance
Automating routine inquiries on the phone means: satisfied customers, relieved employees, and a more efficient operation. The development shows that solutions like smao will soon become the new standard in customer communication. What is still an innovative advantage today will be common for many businesses tomorrow – always available, always competent, always data protection compliant. Companies that embrace Voice AI early gain a competitive advantage in service quality and scalability.
So why wait? Now is the ideal time to elevate your phone support to the next level and automate routine inquiries via AI. Download our white paper if you want to learn more details and best practices. Feel free to exchange ideas in our community with others about AI in customer service. And if you want to see smao in action, contact us for a personal demo – we’ll help you make your customer service future-proof.
