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. The vendors calling to sign up were usually on a job during the hours a sales rep sat at a desk, so they called at seven at night, or on a Saturday. The rep was free when the vendor was busy, and the vendor called after the rep had gone home. Measured on FrontPorch's own line, that mismatch cost 30 to 50 missed calls a month.
Monday mornings went the same way every week. A rep opened a stack of voicemails from Friday and started dialing back, and most of those callbacks went unanswered because the vendor was out on another job. Telling the rep to check voicemail more often wouldn't have changed anything, since the two schedules barely overlapped.
What replaced the voicemail
We built an AI coordinator that answers the vendor line at any hour and picks up whenever a rep can't. It handles the questions callers ask: what the listing includes, how a community gets assigned, what it costs, and how fast they'd go live. It books onto a rep's calendar against real availability, so the caller hangs up with an appointment time in hand. When a call needs a person, the coordinator routes it with the details already attached. Every call also comes back as a written record the 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
Every vendor call FrontPorch gets is now answered, day and night. That's the coverage measured on the line itself. In the first 60-odd calls the agent handled, more than 20 became booked appointments. That works out to roughly one in three, and every one of them came from the pool of calls that used to go to voicemail.
What that number can't tell you is whether a vendor the agent books signs at the same rate as one a rep talked to live. Nobody measured that, and it might be lower. We aren't claiming otherwise, and we wouldn't trust a case study that skipped the question. The claim we can make is narrower. A booked appointment is a better start than a voicemail nobody returns. About a third of the calls that used to dead-end now end with a meeting on a rep's calendar.
Why this isn't only a FrontPorch problem
Vendor lines aren't special here. 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 a message. CallRail's 2025 survey of 1,000 consumers looked at the same problem from the caller's side and found that 82% of people who don't get an answer call a competitor rather than wait for a callback. In both data sets, a missed call usually means a lead that's gone before anyone notices the phone rang.
FrontPorch's fix worked for the reason those numbers matter. Something answered every call. It asked the right questions and booked the meeting while the caller was still on the line, so there was no callback left to lose to whoever they tried next. Nothing in that depends on the line being for vendors. A service or support line fails the same way a sales line does when nobody is free the moment the phone rings, and the same fix applies to all of them.
The full case study covers the rest of the build and shows the math behind every number here, so you can check it yourself.
FAQ
Is "one in three" a close rate?
No. It's the share of AI-handled calls that ended in a booked appointment, out of the pool of calls that used to hit voicemail. We didn't measure whether those appointments close at the same rate as meetings a rep booked, and we don't claim they do.
Does this only work for a sales or vendor line?
No. The agent answers and asks real qualifying questions before it books onto a calendar. That closes the same coverage gap whether the caller is a prospective vendor or a homeowner, and it works the same for existing customers. FrontPorch's line happened to be a sales line. The fix is about having something answer when the phone rings, whatever the call is about.
How long did this take to build?
Under a week from start to live. We didn't migrate platforms or install a new phone system. The coordinator 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, then went to a person instead of being booked automatically. The coordinator handles what it can and hands off the rest cleanly, without forcing every caller into a booking.