AI Phone Agents Are Automating Feedback Loops Via Voice Interviews
We transformed a text-based AI interview platform into a voice-first system that conducts automated phone interviews globally, eliminating user friction and delivering deeper, actionable insights through natural conversations.
Business Context
Cherian Koshy, a USA Today bestselling author, keynote speaker, and behavioral strategist who helps leaders simplify complexity, approached us with a vision to transform how organizations conduct interviews and gather feedback.
Cherian wanted to build a voice-first platform that could reach anyone with a phone, making AI-driven interviews truly accessible and natural. His goals included:
Universal accessibility : Enable anyone to participate, regardless of technical skills or typing ability
Zero-friction experience : Allow recipients to simply answer a phone call and speak naturally
Direct outreach : Implement outbound calling to reach users instantly without email dependencies
Richer insights : Capture the depth, emotion, and nuance that only voice conversations provide
Advanced intelligence : Add sentiment analysis, keyword tracking, and feature-level reporting
Broader market reach : Serve researchers, HR teams, designers, and business owners across any industry conducting interviews
Higher engagement : Deliver completion rates that text surveys simply cannot match
We built a voice-first platform that makes authentic feedback accessible at an unprecedented scale through natural phone conversations.
PlatformsWeb App
Duration12 weeks
IndustryMarketing Tech
We knew scalability and reliability were critical, so we chose a tech stack that could deliver.
Partnership Goal
The client wanted to build a voice-first platform capable of reaching anyone directly via phone calls. The platform needed to automatically call recipients, conduct intelligent AI-powered conversations, and deliver insights far richer than text surveys through sentiment analysis and keyword tracking.
The platform was designed to serve researchers, designers, HR teams, and business owners running customer research, employee engagement surveys, market studies, or community feedback collection.
It needed to work for a single interview just as well as for hundreds of calls in a day, giving teams powerful voice capabilities without complexity, while delivering completion rates and insight depth that text surveys simply cannot match.
Before
- Text-only interview format limited to tech-savvy users
- Required recipients to enter personal details manually
- Relied on email distribution and web links
- Limited to users comfortable with typing responses
- No way to reach recipients who prefer voice communication
- Basic reporting without advanced analytics
- High friction for respondents, leading to lower completion rates
After
- Fully automated phone-based interviews with AI agents
- Zero friction, recipients just answer and speak
- Direct outbound calling to phone numbers globally
- Natural voice conversations accessible to anyone
- SMS broadcast and retry capabilities for failed calls
- Advanced insights: sentiment analysis, keyword tracking, feature reports
- Significantly higher engagement and richer feedback quality
Team Formation
The development required deep expertise in voice AI and telephony integration, technologies that transform how platforms interact with users. This project addressed a challenge faced by research teams worldwide: how to make feedback collection truly accessible while maintaining intelligent, adaptive conversations that extract meaningful insights.
We assembled a lean, cross-functional team to manage the entire development process, from product discovery to software development:
2 backend engineers focused on carrier API integrations, database design, and server-side logic.
1 frontend engineer developed the customer-facing web application portals.
1 business analyst worked closely with the client to translate requirements into clear technical specifications and ensure the product aligned with real operational workflows.
1 senior quality assurance engineer ran continuous tests to ensure every feature was reliable and accurate before release.
1 product manager oversaw the entire engagement, coordinating across teams and keeping delivery on track.
We followed Agile development practices, working in short sprints to deliver features in phases. Asana was used for task management, and Slack for quick communication with both the client and our internal team. Weekly check-ins and live demos kept progress transparent and ensured the product matched real operational workflows.
deeper insights than traditional surveys
delay as insights available as soon as interviews end
from concept to launch
deeper insights than traditional surveys
delay as insights available as soon as interviews end
Our Partnership
Building a voice-first interview platform that could reach anyone, anywhere, required a seamless blend of the right technologies and a tightly coordinated team. Every sprint brought us closer to a platform that could conduct thousands of intelligent phone interviews at scale, delivering insights that text surveys simply cannot capture.
To bring this vision to reality, the team worked in close collaboration across backend, frontend, and QA to build a system that was as seamless as it was powerful. Twilio was brought in to handle global calling infrastructure and SMS delivery, while ElevenLabs Voice Agents were layered on top to enable natural, context-aware conversations that feel genuinely human. AWS infrastructure tied it all together, providing the scalability and reliability needed to support hundreds of simultaneous calls without a hitch.
On the product side, a clean and responsive web interface was built to let users configure interviews, upload contact lists, customize AI voice avatars, and access advanced analytics and reporting from one place. The result was a platform that handles everything from the first outbound call to final insight generation, requiring recipients to do nothing more than pick up the phone.
Phone-Based Interviews
Interviewers upload a list of target phone numbers via CSV, after which the AI agent automatically calls each recipient. Recipients do not need to provide their name, email, or any personal details; they simply answer the phone and speak naturally.
The conversation flows naturally, with the AI asking questions in order and adapting based on responses, just like a human interviewer would. This eliminates all the friction of traditional surveys as there are no links to click, no forms to fill out, and no typing is required.
Voice & Telephony Integration
We integrated Twilio to handle outbound phone calls to recipients worldwide and enable global SMS delivery for interview invitations and follow-ups.
ElevenLabs Voice Agents power the conversational experience, creating dynamic, natural-sounding AI interviewers that understand context, maintain engaging dialogue throughout the interview, and can adapt their questions based on previous responses. The result is a conversation that feels authentic and human, not robotic or scripted.
Intelligent Call Management Dashboard
A comprehensive dashboard tracks every interview in real-time, giving interviewers complete visibility into their campaigns. The system displays totals for completed calls, failed attempts, and pending interviews at a glance.
For failed attempts, whether due to no answer, busy signals, or network issues, interviewers have two one-click options. The options are to retry the phone call or, as a fallback, send an SMS with a web-based interview link.
Completed respondents cannot be retried, and contact numbers are treated as unique per interview to prevent duplicate outreach. Each completed interview generates a full transcript available for review and analysis.
Advanced Reporting & Insights
Three powerful report types transform raw conversation data into actionable business intelligence.
Firstly, the feature reports surface specific insights into the mentioned topics, while the second type, keyword analysis, identifies emerging themes and hidden patterns. The third type, sentiment analysis, adds depth by evaluating the emotional tone of participant responses.
These reports are customizable via templates and editable summaries to suit specific needs. Finally, they can be exported as PDFs for seamless stakeholder sharing.
AI-Powered Insights Bot
An AI-powered chatbot allows interviewers to ask questions directly about their data: "What are the top pain points mentioned?" or "Summarize feedback about the checkout process."
The bot can summarize data, pull specific insights, and help visualize patterns, making it easy to extract meaningful intelligence without manually reviewing every transcript.
SMS Broadcast
Interviewers can send messages to all uploaded contacts simultaneously, useful for interview invitations, reminders, follow-ups, or important updates. This complements the phone-based approach by providing a text communication channel when needed, and serves as an effective fallback for recipients who didn't answer the initial call.
Dynamic Prompt Generation & Customization
The platform generates dynamic prompts tailored to each interview's purpose based on objectives, questions, and constraints provided by the interviewer. The app simplifies interview setup with AI assistance and automatically delivers an AI interviewer tailored to the needs of each interview.
Voice Testing
Each interview is conducted using an AI voice that is automatically determined by the platform to support natural and effective conversations. A preview feature allows interviewers to test the phone interview experience by entering their own number and receiving a test call, validating the entire flow before going live with real recipients.
Comprehensive Analytics Dashboard
Beyond call status tracking, the dashboard provides overview statistics including total responses, complete interviews, incomplete interviews, last response date, average completion time, and average completion rate.
Perceptional provides interview-level sentiment analysis, summarizing responses across the entire conversation into positive, negative, and neutral categories. These insights give interviewers a high-level view of overall trends and help teams refine their interview approach.
What Happened Next – Results
We successfully delivered Perceptional within the 10-12 week timeline as a fully automated voice interview platform. By shifting to voice, we removed critical barriers such as recipients no longer requiring internet access, typing skills, or technical knowledge. They simply answer a phone call and speak naturally.
The automated system powered by Twilio and ElevenLabs handles hundreds of calls, conducts intelligent conversations, and manages failures gracefully with retry logic and SMS fallbacks. Advanced reporting features like sentiment analysis, keyword tracking, and feature reports deliver insights beyond basic transcription, revealing not just what people said but how they felt and what themes emerged.
The platform now serves research teams across any industry, making authentic feedback accessible at unprecedented scale through the natural medium of phone conversations.
