Killing the Hold-Music Tax: Automating Bookings and IVRs

In transport-heavy industries, staff waste hours tethered to phones. Non-emergency medical transport, field service scheduling, insurance assistance, and travel ops all share the same problem: booking rides or appointments through third-party hotlines. The calls themselves are short—five to ten minutes. But the waiting? Agents can sit on hold for 20 to 40 minutes, stuck listening to music, unable to multitask. The result is wasted payroll, frustrated staff, and missed opportunities for efficiency. Voice AI ends the tax of hold music.

The Hidden Drain on Operations

For every 100 bookings, organizations burn dozens of staff hours just waiting. And because the process depends on navigating complex IVRs, there’s little room to speed things up. Staff can’t step away. They can’t work on other tasks. Productivity grinds to a halt.

How Voice Agents Take the Pain Away

Fluents.ai callers do what humans shouldn’t have to:

  • Dial into third-party hotlines
  • Navigate IVRs with DTMF or speech recognition
  • Wait on hold—without costing you staff time
  • Fill out booking details once a live agent answers
  • Capture confirmation numbers and push them into your system

When exceptions or anomalies arise, the AI caller flags them and hands off to a human with full context.

The Before and After

Organizations using this model report dramatic shifts. Staff hours once lost to waiting are freed up for real work. Error rates decline because details like confirmation numbers are logged cleanly. Average time to confirm bookings is cut in half.

The hold music tax disappears.

Why Fluents Is Built for This

Fluents.ai combines:

  • Low-latency voice AI for natural conversation with hotline staff
  • Regex-powered confirmation capture for consistent data entry
  • Webhook callbacks to update CRMs or dispatch systems automatically
  • Scalable outbound dialers to run hundreds of bookings in parallel

It’s like hiring an extra booking team—without the payroll.

How to Roll It Out

  1. Start with your top two IVRs—record every path and exception.
  2. Train Fluents agents to capture confirmation details reliably.
  3. Pilot bookings in a single program, measure time saved, then expand.
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