Your current hold time is 1 hour, 13 minutes…
“Hi, I’ve been on hold for 45 minutes about this billing error.”
“I’ll need to transfer you to billing.”
“But I already spoke to billing! They sent me to you!”
“Please hold while I investigate”
[10 minutes of hold music]
“Thanks for your patience. Your call is very important to us.”
[Call disconnects]
Sound familiar?
We’ve all been there—trapped in an endless loop of transfers, long hold times, and frustrating dead ends. And we’re not alone. Our latest survey, based on insights from over 1,000 consumers, found that 67% would rather…
Sort 20 lbs of M&Ms by color
Cuddle a hungry bear
Watch paint dry for 24 hours
…than go through another support call like this.
No customer should have to endure this, and no company wants to be the reason they do. That’s why we built Forethought Voice—leveraging our industry-leading agentic AI to eliminate these frustrations and finally make customer support calls what they should be: fast, effortless, and actually helpful.
It’s time for customer service calls to finally improve
Despite all the advancements in digital customer service, our 2025 benchmark data found that voice is still the #1 channel across all industries. 65% of consumers think it’s the fastest way to resolve their issues, and 63% think phone agents can understand their emotions best.
Yet customers still hate calling support for three main reasons:
- Long or complicated phone trees make reaching an actual human difficult: 46% of respondents say they’ll hang up after just four button presses in an automated phone menu, and 11% have “zero patience,” hanging up after just one or two presses.
- Customers have to constantly repeat or restart calls: 51% say they’ve had to restart a customer service interaction at least “sometimes,” including 7% who experience this “very often” and 13% who face it “often.”
- Customers are more likely to show emotion over the phone than on any other channel: 66% are most likely to show emotions to agents over the phone, dramatically outpacing chat at 15%, email at 11%, and texting at 8%.
This creates an interesting paradox. Customers feel most heard and understood in the channel where their frustrations surface most intensely. We think voice persists because it offers genuine human connection, which is tough to offer at scale. That’s where AI can help.
Forethought Voice delivers the fast, seamless calling experience customers love.
Forethought Voice will eliminate these frustrations by mimicking the human experience customers expect over the phone without all the wait times, unnecessary hold music, and run-around.
1. It can act on their behalf immediately
We developed Forethought Voice to solve customer issues accurately and quickly without the intervention of a human agent—a dream we realized by using Autoflows, our agentic AI technology, to power voice interactions.
Autoflows enabled Forethought Voice to do more than talk to customers or provide information. It can actively solve their problems using your knowledge base and the right APIs.
This is the fundamental difference between traditional support systems and what we offer. We can take action without handing the customer off to an agent, and we do it accurately, with an experience that starts with someone immediately picking up the phone.
For example, a customer calling about their order status could use Forethought Voice to access their order information, track the package, and provide exact delivery details on the spot.
We’re also proud of how human it sounds. After extensive research to perfect the voice characteristics, we’ve created a solution that delivers the best possible customer experience through natural language processing.
2. It’s incredibly accurate (without tons of upfront work on your part)
The best part is that you can stand up Forethought Voice without ever building a workflow. If you connect Forethought to your existing knowledge base, it automatically paraphrases that information correctly for customers.
We’ve also built channel consistency into Forethought’s core. Once you create or approve a workflow, it delivers the same accurate responses whether your customers reach out through chat, email, or voice.
Say a customer called their bank asking about savings accounts. Forethought Voice could immediately pull accurate details from the knowledge base, like interest rates, fees, minimum requirements, to let human agents focus on the more complex issues.
“This is going to keep changing how we do things. This is the next big thing” Stan Gromer – Director, CS Technology and Innovation, Upwork
3. Service in the language and location they expect
We went the extra mile with voice quality, testing several different vendors to get the right voice engine. Our lead engineer invested countless hours testing different configurations to create a natural, human-like experience.
Forethought Voice offers multiple languages so your customers can receive service in their preferred language. For example, if a customer called a luxury fashion retailer in France, Forethought Voice could immediately greet them in French with a polished, refined tone that perfectly aligns with the brand’s sophisticated image. Or, if a brand is based in the UK, they can choose a voice that best aligns with their locale.
Our clients are already seeing the benefits. Peek said, “Since enabling multi-language, Spanish is now live and working well.”
Forethought Voice is included in our Professional and Enterprise packages or as an add-on for other service tiers.
What makes Forethought Voice different?
At its core, Forethought Voice actually solves customer problems, not just talks about them. It works right away without making you build complex systems, and it delivers the same quality experience no matter how customers reach you.
1. It can work with with IVR (or preferably, without it)
Let’s face it: everyone hates interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Businesses hate maintaining them, and customers hate navigating them. With Forethought Voice, the phone rings, and someone is immediately there to help with rigid menus or lengthy wait times.
If you want to keep your existing IVR system, though, that’s fine. Forethought can work after customers get through the tree. But when possible, customers can eliminate it entirely. Your customers shouldn’t have to press endless buttons just to explain their problems. They should be able to speak naturally and get speedy assistance.
2. You can personalize the entire experience, from language selection to accent
We know that voice conveys your brand character even more effectively than chat. Forethought Voice gives you complete control over how your brand sounds on the phone. You can customize everything from hold music to the specific tone, accent, language, and voice of your AI agent to perfectly match your brand identity.
We’ve even solved one of the most unnatural aspects of voice AI—uncomfortable silences while the system processes information. To bridge these gaps, you can insert natural phrases like “Let me check on that” or “Let me look for it.” These buffer phrases create a natural conversation flow that doesn’t feel robotic.
3. The customer experience is automatically consistent across channels
Forethought delivers something truly unique with its cross-channel consistency. When you create a workflow, it automatically works across all your support channels. You don’t need to individually rebuild anything for chat, email, and voice.
Say you set up a workflow to help a customer login to your platform. Forethought immediately carries that workflow over to email, chat, and voice. All you need to do is turn it on or make minor tweaks if you want the experience to feel slightly different on a specific channel.
Voice runs on our Autoflows technology, but both standard workflows and Autoflows maintain this consistency. If you’ve already built workflows for chat and email support, they’re already copied to voice—you just need to activate them with any voice-specific adjustments.
Why does this change matter for businesses?
Our consumer survey found that 77% of consumers believe customer service influences how they feel about a brand, making this technology critical for your bottom line. It will:
- Reduce costs: Deflecting routine customer interactions means fewer human agents for basic questions only.
- Improve customer satisfaction: Instant support and personalized experiences lead directly to happier customers and stronger loyalty.
- Give you a competitive advantage: Offering 24/7 support for a global audience gives you an edge that customers notice and competitors struggle to match.
- Product data-driven insights: Every interaction provides valuable data you can use to improve products, services, and support processes.
- Enhance sentiment matching: Voice captures tone and emotion that text simply can’t convey, giving you better signals about customer feelings and needs.
- Make seamless agent transitions: When needed, the system provides agents with interaction summaries and sentiment context before they take over.
Voice technology bridges the gap between efficiency and humanity in ways other channels simply can’t match. And while the technological capabilities are impressive, the true value lies in how these tools can strengthen the human connection between your brand and customers.
Voice AI could make your business more human, not less
The irony isn’t lost on us. In an age where AI communication is starting to dominate, voice remains the channel where customers feel most heard. It’s where emotions are expressed most freely, and frustration, relief, and gratitude come through unfiltered.
Forethought Voice is about restoring human connection in customer service. We create space for meaningful interactions between brands and customers by eliminating friction points. The question isn’t “How can we reduce call volume?” but “How can we make each interaction worthwhile?”
The future isn’t choosing between efficiency and empathy—it’s achieving both. Stay tuned for even more features like SMS handoff and Voice Insights.
Request a demo to transform your voice support from a necessary evil to a competitive advantage.
