AI Voice Agent That Handles 80% of Inbound Freight Calls

The challenge

The operations centre was handling 300+ inbound calls daily — delivery ETA queries, POD requests, and booking confirmations. 60% were routine enquiries that required no human judgment. Staff were tied up on the phone instead of managing exceptions.

Our solution

We built an AI voice agent using ElevenLabs (voice synthesis), Twilio (telephony), and N8N orchestration. The agent handles routine call types end-to-end, with warm transfer to human agents for complex cases. It integrates with the TMS to pull real-time shipment data.

The Problem

In B2B logistics, information is everything. Clients want to know where their freight is, when it will arrive, and whether the proof of delivery has been uploaded. These questions don't require expertise — but answering them consumed over half the operations centre's call capacity.

Meanwhile, genuine exceptions — damaged goods, missed collections, re-routing requests — were being queued behind routine enquiries. The team was reactive instead of proactive.

Our Approach

We started by analysing 3,000 call transcripts to categorise enquiry types and identify the 5 call flows that made up 80% of volume. From there, we designed conversational scripts for each flow.

The technical stack: Twilio receives inbound calls. A webhook triggers N8N, which calls the TMS API to retrieve shipment data, passes context to OpenAI to determine intent, and uses ElevenLabs to synthesise a natural-sounding response. For complex or flagged calls, the system does a warm transfer to a human agent with a real-time briefing.

We ran a 2-week pilot on 20% of inbound traffic before full rollout.

The Outcome

The voice agent now handles 80% of routine inbound calls without human involvement. The operations team reports that Mondays — previously the highest-pressure day with weekend backlog — are now manageable. The CSAT score improved significantly, primarily because human agents now have time to properly handle the complex cases that actually require empathy and judgment.

The 24/7 availability has opened a new capability: clients from different time zones can now get shipment updates outside business hours without a call centre cost.