Front-desk cover at a tenth of the cost, around the clock
Phone calls → understand, book, log → Dynamics 365 + ticketing
An AI voice agent answers the phone, works out what the caller wants, books consultations, handles basic support, and writes the outcome into Dynamics 365 with a transcript. It costs about $0.08 a call. It replaced an overseas front-desk hire, so the cash saving is modest at around $12,000 a year. The bigger change is cover: the role handled one shift, the agent handles all of them.
What it's worth
Cost of cover
- Overseas front-desk hire
- ~$1,200 / mo
- Cost of the role per year
- ~$14,400
- Calls per month
- ~1,500
- Cost per call
- $0.08
- Cost of the agent per year
- ~$1,440
- saved per year
- ~$12,000
How this was calculated — every assumption
- The role replaced was an overseas hire at roughly $1,200 a month, not a US salary. Against a US front desk the same system would show ten times the saving, which is exactly why the honest number is the one worth publishing.
- Call volume is an estimate, so the saving is rounded down. At higher volume the agent costs more and the gap narrows a little.
- The dollar figure understates the result. The hire covered one shift in one timezone. The agent answers every call, including the 2am one from a graduate overseas. There is no clean way to price that, so it is described instead.
- Faster booking also lifted conversion on inbound interest. Not measured, not claimed.
Results at a glance
- ~$12,000 a year saved against the role it replaced
- About a tenth of the cost per call
- 24/7 cover, where the role handled one shift
- 95%+ of calls handled without a human
- Every call logged to the CRM with a transcript
- Demo in 2 weeks, live in 6
The problem
Support staff were stretched across CRM updates, scheduling, ticketing, and answering email, phone, and chat. The repetitive work drained the team, slowed response times, and did not match how the company wanted to present itself. Cover was limited too. Anyone calling outside one timezone's business hours reached nobody.
What was built
The voice
ElevenLabs voice over Twilio, so callers get a natural conversation rather than a phone tree.
The brain
n8n coordinates everything through a custom MCP server that gives the agent its tools.
The connections
Wired into Microsoft Teams, Dynamics 365, and Outlook calendar, so bookings and outcomes land where the team already works.
The tuning
Refined over roughly 3-day cycles until it handled 95%+ of calls alone, with walkthroughs, docs, and training at handover.
What keeps it from breaking
The 95% is measured
Below that threshold the economics flip. A voice agent that hands off half its calls costs more than it saves once you count the frustration.
Every call leaves a record
Transcripts and outcomes are written to Dynamics 365 as they happen. A voice agent you cannot review is one nobody trusts with customers.
How the approach worked
A phone call is just another channel to pull structured information out of. Understand what the caller wants, check it, and deliver it cleanly into the CRM. Get the handled-alone rate high enough and the economics change completely. Though here the more interesting change was not the cost line. It was that the phone stopped having office hours.
The results
The agent launched on schedule. Basic support and scheduling dropped away, faster bookings lifted satisfaction, and the team moved onto higher-value work. The direct saving against the overseas role is around $12,000 a year. The cover went from one shift to all of them.
One shift of overseas cover at ~$1,200 a month. Slow bookings, fragile integrations, hard to scale.
24/7 cover at ~$120 a month in call costs. Bookings handled instantly, everything logged.
Noah was fast, communicative, and cracked every integration, some of which we worried weren't even possible.
Tools & technologies
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