AI Calling Systems That Actually Connect: Fixing Answer Rates with Kevin DeMeritt

Rachel Thorne: This is Dialed In with Derek Simmons and Rachel Thorn. Let's talk compliance. Derek Simmons: Okay. Hey everyone, welcome back to Dialed In. How you doing today, Derek? Speaker 3: Running on coffee and car logs, so, you know, pretty normal. How are you holding up? Derek Simmons: Mhm. Same. Today we're hitting three things. One, a quick check-in. Two, the big voice AI misconception—why teams chase connection rates before they even look at conversation quality. And three, those Terrible connection rates and what spam likely is doing to trust. Speaker 4: Mhm. Speaker 3: Right. And we've got a special guest, Kevin, the CEO and founder of 2X Solutions, breaking down why a lot of AI calling systems fail. All before anyone even says hello. Derek Simmons: So, grab whatever you use to sanity check your outbound numbers. Speaker 3: Real talk for a second. This one might sting a little. Derek Simmons: Okay, first up, quick housekeeping and how we're really doing today. We want to hear from you. Submit questions via the web form in the description or give us a call at 747-946-7602 and leave your question. Don't be shy. Our AI assistant makes it super easy. Kevin, I'm really glad we're getting into this today because you've actually built companies from the ground up in phone sales, so you know exactly where these systems fall apart before anyone even picks up. How are you doing today? Speaker 5: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Rachel. Derek Simmons: That's wonderful to hear. I really appreciate you being here. So before we started recording, we talked about digging into what actually breaks when companies try to scale AI calling systems. Let me start with something foundational. What's the hardest part of getting real results from voice AI? Is it the technology itself or is there something else that trips people up first? Speaker 5: Well, honestly, I think one of the... One of the biggest misconceptions in the entire AI voice industry right now is everybody is obsessed with the AI agent itself. How does it sound? Does it sound human? Can it handle objections? Can it have a long conversation? But what they're really skipping, Rachel, is the first and most important step, which is can you even get the person to answer the phone? Because if your connection rates are terrible. The rest doesn't matter if you can't get them on the phone. Derek Simmons: That's really striking. So you're saying companies are polishing the conversation when the real problem is they're not even getting through in the first place? What does a terrible connection rate actually look like, and what's causing it? Speaker 5: Yeah, so, you know. That's what everybody thinks. I have to have this perfect sounding AI voice and they have to sound good or nobody's going to have a conversation with it. But in reality, the outbound voice AI today is mostly a deliverability and trust problem. It's very similar to email marketing years ago. People thought email marketing was about writing better emails, but eventually everyone realized if your emails go to spam folders. That copy doesn't matter and your AI is going through the exact same thing right now. You can have the smartest conversational AI on the planet, but if your number says spam likely or if your calls look suspicious or if your timing is bad and your cadence is wrong with calls, your system absolutely fails before the conversation even starts. Derek Simmons: That's a really important distinction. So it's not about the brilliance of the AI, it's about whether the call even gets through the gate. Walk me through what you see when you audit a company that's struggling with connection rates. What does their setup typically look like, and what's the first red flag you spot? Speaker 5: Well, the first red flag I spot is that they focus on the AI as opposed to focusing on the connection system. At 2X, we realized... Just very early on that connection rates are driven by psychology, number reputation and sequencing. So we built an entire platform around what we call caller credibility metrics to make sure that a call goes through. Derek Simmons: So you're building around caller credibility instead of just agent quality? When you say psychology is one of the drivers, what does that actually mean in practice? Speaker 5: Well, with our caller credibility metrics, what it means to us is we engineered the entire experience before the phone even rings. For example, most companies just instantly blast out calls. We don't do that. If someone... Their customer, a customer of ours, you know, a company of ours company has a person filling out a form. Our system will typically send a very short human style text first, something like, Hey, John, this is Sarah with ABC Advisors. I just received your request and I'm going to give you a quick call in a minute. If you do that. And the phone rings 10 or 15 seconds later or 30 seconds later, that tiny sequence changes everything psychologically. Now the person recognizes the call, the brain has context, it feels expected instead of random, and that alone could dramatically improve answer rates. So another The system that we use is called local presence where the number that you're calling from is the same local area code and that helps people trust the number a little bit more. Connection rates go up a little bit more from there and real-time spam remediation on the phone numbers to make sure the number doesn't say spam. Which is extremely important. And all of that adds into our call or credibility scores, because if no one picks up the phone, Rachel, then you've you've accomplished nothing or little with a call because you don't have anybody on the phone. Derek Simmons: So that text message before the call, that's doing this psychological heavy lifting? How much does that sequence actually move the needle on answer rates compared to just dialing cold? Speaker 5: Yeah, absolutely. It's probably one of the biggest things that we see that's going to increase. your connection rate, especially with new leads. You know, a new lead comes in, that person really doesn't expect the phone to ring 30 seconds a minute later. And so adding that texting. Rachel Thorne: and can really help where the person puts it together that this call coming in is the call that I'm expecting because of that text. So we'll see answer rates sometimes increase anywhere from 10 to as high as 20%. But doing that, but it's very difficult to have people do it because if they had to send a text out and then wait a minute, make a dial, it's very inefficient. a very inefficient use of their time. So this just really helps out the connection rate and increases your call metrics tremendously. Derek Simmons: That's a significant jump, 10 to 20 percent just from that context-setting text. When a company tries to scale that approach across hundreds or thousands of leads, what tends to break first? Rachel Thorne: Well, if humans are trying to do it, what really breaks is just efficiency because, you know, the person that's dialing wants to click a button and have the phone ring or an auto dialer is doing it for them. them but if you have to leave a text and then wait and then make a phone call and leave a voicemail if they don't pick up it's just an incredibly ineffective use of anybody's time who's a great salesperson. Why are you paying a salesperson to dial, chase, and leave voice messages when their real job is to help you close business, create revenue? So that's one of the biggest things that we see breaking in companies that don't have a system that can leave the voicemail, that can leave that text, that has the caller metrics to get a phone. picked up by their customer if they don't have all of that built into a system it becomes very inefficient for you know their people as as a human to be able to do that the correct way Derek Simmons: That makes perfect sense. You're essentially freeing up your best people to focus on the actual sales conversation rather than the manual labor of chasing leads. Since you've seen this from both sides, as a business owner and now building these tools, why do you think so many companies still fail when they try to build their own AI calling systems in-house instead of using a platform like yours? Rachel Thorne: It's a great question. I think one of the biggest ones, they think AI calling is a software program, and it's not. It's an operational system. You need the timing strategy. How often should you make those calls? What does that workflow look like? The carrier reputation management, right? Like, can we protect that phone number from spam? The call sequencing. How many calls in a day? How many calls in a month? How many calls in a week? You know, all of those really make a big difference just for somebody to pick up the phone. And then you have things like compliance. There's TCPA compliance. We've spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars making sure that the call goes out at the right time of the day for the federal rules. Human transfer logic. Did that person. Was that person qualified before we made the transfer? Otherwise, I'm just transferring a bunch of unqualified people to salespeople who expect to have someone that is slightly qualified. What's the voicemail strategy? Sometimes 50% of the calls, they come back. or from voicemails? And what does that strategy look like? What's the texting strategy look like within that workflow? And what's the conversational flow engineering? How did you train the AI and make all of this work together? And that's really why most DIY implementations struggle. They don't have the compliance, they don't have the security, and then they don't have all of the things with the timing, reputation of the phone, the call sequencing, the human transfer strategies that you need to make it successful. And you need millions of calls to kind of put that together to make sure you've got it right. Derek Simmons: That is a massive list of moving parts, and it really highlights that this is an operational challenge, not just a software one. When you talk about that human transfer logic, ensuring the salesperson gets a qualified lead, how long should the AI actually keep someone on the phone before it makes that handoff? Rachel Thorne: The goal of AI on leads is not to have a 12-minute conversation. The goal is identify intent. qualify quickly and transfer that momentum, that excitement to a human in a business while that excitement is high or book an appointment. And in many industries, the sweet spot for the AI is 45 seconds to 120 seconds before you make a transfer. Long AI conversations oftentimes reduce close rates because the emotional momentum has faded. The companies just haven't asked too many questions and you still want that human to get that call while the excitement is high when the AI gets it on the phone and makes the transfer or, you know, books the appointment. Some people qualify too long before they book the appointment and then the person is exhausted and says, OK, fine, I'll think about it and they don't book that appointment. So you want to move the conversation along and keep that excitement. statement and that momentum with that person when the transfers made or when the appointment is booked. Derek Simmons: That is such a counterintuitive point, but it makes total sense. You want to hand off that energy while it's still peaking, not after the lead has been interrogated for 10 minutes. Since you've been in this space for so long, looking ahead, where do you see the biggest shift happening and how businesses handle these lead conversations in the next few years? Rachel Thorne: Well, I think the biggest shift in the industry is going to be. You know, having those businesses understand that it's more than just a voice, right? And so many people put so much emphasis on the voice. And if you can't get the person on the phone. Then the voice doesn't matter because they're never going to hear it. So the first part of it is, what are all the things that need to happen before that voice even starts having a conversation? And then getting that voice on and understanding the psychology of keeping that momentum going, keeping the customer excited about either making an appointment or talking to the person and potentially having a sale. made and then making sure all of that is compliant because in the next two to three years you can absolutely bet that the government is going to have rules and regulations wrapped around AI as it gets better and better and can have, you know, more conversations and possibly even sell. So I think that companies need to have a strategy for each one of those parts so that when they start an AI to help effectively you know run and automate their business more and be competitive because a lot of people are putting this into place that they look at all three of those as opposed to hey geez does this thing just sound human because that's that's almost the last thing on the list that should happen if you're not compliant to get big fines if you can't get anybody on the phone it doesn't matter what the voice sounds like so the voice actually falls to the bottom and compliance security and connectability move to the top. Derek Simmons: Kevin, this has been such a great conversation, and I really appreciate you laying out how backwards most people have this whole thing. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing what you've actually learned from building at scale. Kevin really reframed AI calling failures for me three things stood out one why the DIY approach falls apart two the psychology of that pre-call text and three the timing of handing off to a human Speaker 3: Yeah, on the DIY side, I liked his line that engineering isn't the same as persuasion. You can wire up a dialer, but if you ignore buyer psychology, you end up with those terrible connection rates he talked about. Derek Simmons: And that pre-call text psychology was big. He's basically saying set context, reduce anxiety, and give people a reason to care before the phone even rings. That alone can meaningfully lift answer rates. Speaker 3: Plus, the human transfer logic. Don't dump every pickup onto a rep. Let AI filter, confirm intent, then pass over a warmed up qualified person within seconds. That's where tech and humans actually complement each other. Derek Simmons: So, smarter sequencing, better messaging, and precise handoff timing. Speaker 3: A beat, let's rap there and head into the outro. Derek Simmons: So if today showed you anything, it's that fixing connection rates comes before obsessing over fancy voice AI polish. That's the system to audit first. Speaker 3: Yeah, like if no one picks up, your perfect script is just yelling into the void. Derek Simmons: Exactly. Hit subscribe, drop a quick review, and share this with your ops or legal team. Speaker 3: Thanks for hanging out with us on Dialed In. We'll talk to you next time.