AI-first support lines added 71 seconds to Call4me's median wait for a person

The gap between the two medians is 71 seconds ^[19]. RuntimeWire's review of the recordings puts the extra time in one step. On an AI-first line, the automated system asks for account details or routes the caller before the human hold queue begins ^[16]. The agent has to get through that exchange before it starts waiting.

Both medians come from small groups of calls. With 11 AI-first calls, 3:07 is just the sixth wait when the eleven are sorted ^[23]. Two or three calls classified the other way could move it.

Medians do hold up against the long tail. United took 19:09 and Delta 16:15, and most of both waits came after the callers were already in the hold queue ^[7]. On the Delta call, about 15 minutes 11 seconds passed between the assistant's handoff and a representative answering ^[21]. The caller spent that time on hold after turning down a callback and messaging ^[8]. At Call4me's listed $0.25 a minute ^[15], the United wait comes to about $4.79 before anyone speaks, assuming every minute on the line is billed ^[22].

An agent without account details can still get through, at least sometimes. One DIRECTV caller said it wanted to cancel, said it had no account number, chose satellite service, and reached a representative at about 2:47 ^[9]. A first attempt had not reached anyone ^[9]. RuntimeWire says the pair shows a route that worked once and proves no rule about which callers DIRECTV transfers ^[10].

The caller is being tested as well. Founder Nick Khami built Call4me so an AI agent can place business calls, work through menus and hold queues, and report back to the user ^[17]. Its own AI made most of the measured calls ^[3]. The seven failed calls with caller error never produced a time, so they fall outside both medians ^[24]. They still count against the reach rate. The agent's own pace also sits inside every timed call, because the clock runs from the start of the recording to the first live voice ^[5]. RuntimeWire concludes that the result mixes the phone systems with the choices and performance of the AI making the calls ^[18]. I'd credit Call4me for listing its own product's mistakes in the methodology, including a bug on its side, and for keeping those calls in the count ^[11].

Some of the fastest routes reached sales or quote staff instead of the support team an existing customer would need ^[14]. With the clock stopped at the first live voice, a fast answer from the wrong department still scores as fast.

Each company was called on a single day, at whatever time it was being written about, and most got one call ^[12]. Call4me says the results do not rank customer-service quality and do not show how waits vary by time or day ^[13]. The figures are its own, not an independent or controlled benchmark ^[2]. For the 71 seconds to transfer to another team's voice agent, that agent would need to call similar companies at similar hours, fail at a similar rate, and arrive with or without the same account details these systems ask for.