VOIQ’s ‘Uber for telemarketing’ lets companies create on-demand call centers

The call center is the team that is responsible for helping with lead generation. But often only large enterprises have the resources to deploy one in-house.

So what about everyone else who wants something more efficient and affordable?

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VOIQ is here to answer the call (sorry, no pun intended) with its “Uber for telemarketing” platform. The service lets companies scale their call operations quickly, without needing fixed infrastructure or internal teams. Instead, VOIQ will leverage call agents who use their own mobile device and work from home.

While this may seem like just outsource telemarketing, there’s more to it than that. VOIQ customers uploads a call script to the system and a list of the people they want called. Based on the call campaign type, the service will select call agents that best match those who needs to be called, offering a more localized marketing approach.

Ricardo Garcia-Amaya, VOIQ’s founder and chief executive, told VentureBeat that an algorithm uses psychoanalytic matching to help determine if the agent and the call recipient have similar traits to help make the interaction smoother — if you speak Spanish, for example, you might receive a call from a bilingual call agent who lives in the same town.

“Before, call centers tried for accent neutrality … the model has completely changed, where commonality has become a huge thing,” he said.

VOIQ also provides its customers with metrics, including how many calls were completed, the optimal call length, contacts’ response, and it’ll also provide you with sentiment analysis to determine if the calls were positive or negative.

All the agents that VOIQ works with are experienced in working with call centers. The company is not focusing on having them sell products. Instead it’s more about lead generation and qualification. “They don’t need to know a lot about the product they’re representing,” Garcia-Amaya said. “They just need to know enough.” All questions the caller is asked are multiple choice, and VOIQ makes it a point to make it easier for agents to get the job done — they’re not here to ask contacts to take a lengthy survey.

Companies can work with VOIQ on a case-by-case basis — no contracts are needed. The cost for using the service will vary, but VOIQ charges between $0.69 and $0.89 per minute. Companies are charged by the time agents spend making calls on their behalf, regardless of whether the call goes through or goes to a wrong number, busy signal, or voice mail. Garcia-Amaya says that on average a company could pay $400 on a rate of $0.69 per minute.

Oh, and the call agents get paid between $10 to $20 per hour.

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If you’re dealing with a lot of busywork and you want to just qualify leads for a project you’re working on, then perhaps VOIQ is something worth looking at. The service is using qualified and experienced call center professionals who are able to handle a script and ask the necessary questions, and it’s at a rather affordable per-minute price. What’s more, all calls are recorded so you can hear the responses and review all the pertinent metrics.

VOIQ is backed by Y Combinator and has been a part of two other accelerator programs, Momentum and Roundtable.