Under a hundred calls a month came into FrontPorch's inbound vendor line, and a third to half of them never reached a person. FrontPorch sells service businesses a spot as the preferred provider in their own neighborhood: pest control, HVAC, roofing, chiropractors, personal trainers. Most of those prospective vendors are working a job during the hours a sales rep sits at a desk, so they called at seven at night. They called Saturday. The rep and the caller only had time to talk when the other one didn't, and the gap between those two schedules is what turned into 30 to 50 missed calls a month, measured on FrontPorch's own line.
Monday mornings looked the same every week. A rep opened a stack of Friday voicemails and started dialing back, most of them unanswered, because the vendor was on a job again. That's not a discipline problem. It's two schedules that rarely overlap, and no amount of "check voicemail more often" fixes a structural mismatch like that.
What replaced the voicemail
We built an AI coordinator that answers the vendor line at any hour and picks up whatever a rep doesn't. It handles what a caller actually asks: what the listing includes, how a community gets assigned, what it costs, how fast they'd go live. It books straight onto a rep's calendar against real availability, so the caller hangs up with a time instead of a promise. Calls that need a person get routed with the detail already attached, and every call comes back as a written record a rep can read before picking up the account. It went live in under a week.
The number that matters, and the one we won't claim
All of FrontPorch's vendor calls get answered now. Not an estimate of coverage, not a target: it's the actual coverage, day and night. And in the first 60-odd calls the agent handled, more than 20 turned into booked appointments. That's roughly one in three calls, drawn entirely from the pool that used to disappear into voicemail.
Here's what that number doesn't tell you: whether a vendor the agent books signs at the same rate as one a rep talked to live. Nobody measured that. It might be lower. We're not claiming it isn't, and a case study that skips past that question isn't one worth trusting. What we can say is narrower and still real: a booked appointment starts ahead of a voicemail that never gets a callback, and a third of a shrinking pile of dead-end calls turned into live ones.
Why this isn't a FrontPorch-only story
The pattern that made FrontPorch's problem expensive isn't unique to a vendor line. Invoca's data across home-services call traffic puts the unanswered share at 27% industry-wide, and fewer than 3% of the callers routed to voicemail ever leave one. CallRail's 2025 survey of 1,000 consumers found the same shape from the caller's side: 82% who don't get an answer call a competitor instead of waiting for a callback. A missed call isn't a delayed lead in either data set. It's usually a lead that's gone by the time anyone notices it rang.
FrontPorch's fix worked for the same reason those numbers matter: something answered every time, asked the right questions, and booked the meeting on the spot instead of promising a callback that competes with whatever the caller tries next. That's the mechanism, not a vendor-line-specific trick. It applies to a sales line, a service line, or a support line the same way, because the failure it's fixing (nobody available exactly when the phone rings) doesn't care what kind of call is coming in.
The full case study has the rest of the build detail and the math behind every number here, shown so it can be checked rather than taken on faith.
FAQ
Is "one in three" a close rate?
No, and that distinction matters. It's the share of AI-handled calls that became a booked appointment, out of the pool of calls that used to hit voicemail. Whether those appointments close at the same rate as a rep-booked meeting wasn't measured, and we're not claiming it did.
Does this only work for a sales or vendor line?
The mechanism doesn't care what the call is about. Answering, qualifying with real questions, and booking directly onto a calendar solves the same coverage gap whether the caller is a prospective vendor, a homeowner, or an existing customer. FrontPorch's line happened to be sales; the underlying fix is about coverage, not the topic of the call.
How long did this take to build?
Under a week from start to live. The build wasn't a platform migration or a new phone system: it connected to the existing line and the existing calendar, which is most of why it moved that fast.
What happened to the calls that weren't a fit?
They still got answered and logged, just routed to a person instead of booked automatically. The coordinator's job is to handle what it can and hand off cleanly what it can't, not to force every caller into a booking.