How a leading telecom 2x'd qualified leads in 13 days with multi-channel AI

The Challenge

A large lead acquisition company processing millions of leads annually for major clients across telecom, home services, and insurance wanted to test whether AI-powered outreach across voice and RCS could improve lead qualification. Their existing stack — Iterable, outbound call centers, and Twilio — had hit its ceiling.

Problems with the Traditional Stack

• Disconnected channels: Voice and text messaging operated independently. When prospects didn't answer calls, context was lost during subsequent outreach.
• Low engagement rates: Traditional SMS follow-ups were increasingly filtered as spam. With Apple's iOS 26 introducing enhanced spam detection, deliverability concerns mounted.
• Inconsistent lead quality: Lead-to-sale conversion hovered around 20%, indicating substantial room to improve prospect quality before human agent contact.
• Scale limitations: More than 2,000 call center agents reached capacity during peak periods, creating bottlenecks and prospect drop-offs.
• AI Voice was unreliable: The team's nearly two-year development effort for an AI voice solution showed early promise but encountered scalability and reliability constraints.

The Solution

Clerk AI deployed an AI agent operating across voice and RCS messaging as a unified experience, sharing context between channels. The implementation focused on lead qualification for the telecommunications provider.

AI-Powered Voice Agents

Clerk AI's agent initiated outbound calls with natural conversation. When prospects answered, the agent qualified them in real time — asking appropriate questions, addressing concerns, and routing qualified leads to human agents.

iOS & Android Call Screening Detection

Clerk AI's proprietary ScreenSense technology detected Apple and Android call screening with 97% accuracy, significantly improving call pickups and downstream conversion.

Intelligent Voicemail Detection

When calls went unanswered, TrueReach identified answering machines with 97%+ accuracy. The AI agent left personalized voicemails tailored to each contact — not generic scripts — increasing callback rates and brand perception.

RCS Messaging That Breaks Through Spam Filters

Following missed calls or voicemails, the AI agent automatically followed up via RCS for Business. Unlike traditional SMS, RCS messages appeared as verified, branded communications with company logos and names. Apple's iOS 18 spam checker flagged zero messages from Clerk AI's agents.

Cross-Channel Memory: The Deciding Factor

The critical differentiator was OmniMemory — Clerk AI's multi-modal memory layer maintaining full context across all channels. When prospects who missed calls responded to RCS messages, the AI agent knew exactly where conversations ended. Previous solutions couldn't deliver this continuity.

The Results

The pilot was designed to run 45 days with 5,000 contacts and up to 15 touch points per lead. Results exceeded all expectations.

Too Effective to Continue

Within 13 days, Clerk AI had doubled qualified lead volume reaching the call center. The telecom client's human agents couldn't manage the influx of high-quality, conversion-ready prospects. The pilot required pausing — not due to poor performance, but because it worked too well.

Consumers Loved the Experience

Customer satisfaction scores improved significantly. Prospects responded positively to branded RCS experiences, engaging at rates substantially exceeding traditional SMS. Qualified leads converted at rates three times higher than traditional marketing campaigns.

Unified Intelligence Across Channels

The AI agent's ability to seamlessly transition between voice, voicemail, and RCS while maintaining conversational context proved decisive. Leads that might have gone dormant after missed calls were re-engaged through intelligent, timely follow-ups that felt personalized rather than automated.

“We had to pause the pilot — not because it didn't work, but because it worked too well. Our call center couldn't keep up with the volume of qualified leads Clerk AI was generating.”

VP of Marketing Operations

Leading Customer Acquisition Company