Switch off the answerphone: the ProConnect Service Agent now answers the phone

The ProConnect Service Agent has handled WhatsApp enquiries for some of the biggest trade channels in the UK for a while. From this month it also answers the phone, in a British voice, on your existing number. Here’s why that wasn’t practical until now, and how a wholesaler can try it with nothing at risk.

The 11pm order

Most wholesalers I know still take orders on an answerphone. A chef finishes service, rings the depot, and leaves a message: thirty seconds of kitchen noise, a list read too fast, a product name that could be one of three things, and a phone number that gets cut off. In the morning somebody in the sales office plays it back twice, guesses, and keys it in. Then the van turns up with the wrong case, or the right case and a missing one, and the first call of the day is a complaint.

Nobody is at fault. An answerphone is a recorder. It cannot ask a question.

What a voice agent does with the same call

The ProConnect Service Agent takes that call live. It knows the account from the number it was called from, so it already has the customer’s name, depot and delivery day. It listens to the order, asks what it needs (“Was that the 5kg or the 2.5kg?”), reads it back line by line and confirms it. If the customer wants something that isn’t in the range, it says so and offers to pass the request on. The sales office opens the morning to a structured order against the right account, not a recording.

That is the whole difference. The agent turns a verbal order into something a person can act on in seconds, and a verbal enquiry into a task that lands with the right team. It will take a booking, a return with a photo, a new-account application or a “put me through to my rep” in the same way. Anything it can’t finish, it hands over, and it tells the customer that it has.

Why not before now

We have been running voice agents as proofs of concept for some time, and until recently I wouldn’t have put one in front of a trade customer. Four things stopped it, and all four have moved in the last few months.

1. Latency. Earlier voice models paused for a second or two before every reply. On the phone that reads as a bad line or a confused operator, and people hang up. The current generation replies at conversational speed, so a customer can interrupt, correct a line and carry on as they would with a person.
2. The accent. Almost every voice agent sounded American, and a Californian voice answering a cash and carry in Bolton was never going to land. The voices we deploy now are British, natural and consistent across a call. The agent still switches language when the caller does.
3. Background noise. A kitchen at 11pm, a van cab, a shop floor with the radio on: these are the environments our customers’ customers call from. Older systems lost the thread in all of them. The current models separate the voice from the noise well enough that a kitchen order comes through cleanly.
4. The phone line. Voice agents used to need a new number and a new app, which meant asking customers to change how they call. The agent now connects over SIP, the standard behind modern business phone systems. It can sit behind your existing switchboard, take overflow when the office is busy, take everything out of hours, or take the lot. Your customers ring the number they have always rung.

With those four fixed, voice agents are ready for everyday use in the trade, not just for demonstrations.

Run it alongside the answerphone, with nothing at risk

I know what the first reaction will be. Handing a voice agent your customer base, even out of hours, feels like a leap, and no wholesaler wants to find out at 7am that the leap went wrong. So don’t leap.

Run the two side by side. Keep the answerphone exactly as it is, on the number everyone has. Give the agent a second number. Then tell your customers, plainly: “If you’d rather leave your order on the answerphone, ring the usual number. If you’d like to try our new voice agent, which we’re testing and would love your feedback on, ring this one.”

Nothing changes for anyone who doesn’t want it to. The customers who are curious try it; the ones who aren’t carry on as before. Your sales office sees both streams in the morning, the recordings on one side and the structured orders on the other, and the comparison makes the decision for you. The customers who do try it tend to tell you what they think, and that feedback is worth more than any demo we could give you.

Once the second number is doing the work, the steps after it are small: overflow when the office is busy, then out of hours on the main number, then as much of the day as you like. Each one is a change to a divert, not a project.

The same agent, the same knowledge bank and the same inbox already answer WhatsApp, SMS and email, so a customer who texts at lunchtime and rings at midnight is talking to the same thing, and your team sees both in one place.

Where it goes next

We are already wiring the agent into customers’ back-office systems, so a verbal order can be placed, a delivery can be booked and an account query can be answered from live data. That is the direction for the next few months. For now, the honest claim is this: every call answered, every order captured accurately, every enquiry routed, in your customers’ language, at any hour, on the number you already have.