AI Calling Vendor Checklist: 20 Questions Before You Buy

AI calling demos are easy to make impressive. The agent is polite, the script is short, the caller is a colleague who knows what to say. What decides whether it works for you is everything the demo doesn’t show. Real leads who interrupt. Hindi on a bad line. What happens after the call. What the bill looks like after a month of retries.

These 20 questions cover what a demo usually leaves out. They are grouped by topic, and at the end there is a one-page table you can print or paste into an RFP. None of them are specific to any vendor, including us.

How to use this checklist

• Send the questions in writing and ask for written answers. Vague answers on paper are easier to spot.
• Ask for evidence: a live call, a screen share of the call log, a sample invoice, a contract clause.
• Score each answer 0 (no or unclear), 1 (partly) or 2 (clear, with evidence). Compare vendors on the same sheet.
• Weight the questions that matter most for your use case. For collections, compliance matters more. For admissions, speed and handoff do.

Conversation quality

1. Can I call your agent right now, on a real phone line, with a script close to mine? A recorded demo tells you almost nothing. Call from an ordinary mobile, interrupt, go quiet, ask something off-script. If the vendor needs a week to set up a test call, find out why.

2. What happens when the caller interrupts, goes silent or says “hmm” mid-sentence? The agent should stop for a real interruption but carry on through a short “haan” or “okay”. It should recover from silence without looping (“Hello? Are you there? Hello?”) and end politely if it can’t hear the caller.

3. How do you stop the agent from inventing answers? Ask what the agent does when a caller asks something the script doesn’t cover, such as a price it wasn’t given. The right answer is “it says it will find out, or hands over”, not “the model is very accurate”.

Languages

4. Which languages are in production today, and which are only supported by the speech engine? Speech engines often list many Indian languages. That doesn’t mean the vendor has tuned scripts, grammar and testing for each one. Ask which languages have live customer calls running, and ask to hear one.

5. Can I hear the exact voice and engine that will go out, and change it later? Preview voices on the same phone-quality audio your callers will hear. Ask whether switching voice or engine later means rebuilding the agent.

Telephony and numbers

6. Whose phone lines are the calls made on, and what caller ID will my leads see? Some vendors include telephony. Others expect you to bring SIMs, a dialler or a telecom contract. Ask which number series your calls will show, and who owns the numbers if you leave.

7. What limits protect me from runaway calling? Look for a daily call cap, protection against dialling the same lead twice, a maximum call length, answering-machine handling, and retry limits with a gap between attempts. Ask what happens when your balance runs out: do calls stop, or does the bill keep growing?

Compliance and DLT

8. Who registers us on DLT and declares our automated calling, and who pays for it? Commercial calls in India go through TRAI’s DLT framework. TRAI’s September 2026 amendment defines Application-to-Person (A2P) calls to include artificial-voice calls, and, once its A2P provisions take effect (60 days after Gazette publication), will require senders to declare them to their operator in advance, with the number ranges used. Calls made without that declaration are treated as spam. Ask exactly which steps the vendor handles and which stay with you.

9. How are calling windows, opt-outs and consent records handled? Can you restrict calls to set hours? When a caller says “don’t call me again”, does that stop future calls automatically? Can you export evidence of when and how each lead came in? Be wary of any vendor that says it “guarantees” compliance. Your consent records and call categories are your responsibility.

CRM, workflow and post-call actions

10. How do leads get in, and how do outcomes get out? Ask for the exact mechanism: native integration (name the product and version), webhooks, CSV, or a lead form connector. “We integrate with everything” is not an answer. Ask to see a lead arrive and get called in the demo.

11. What happens after each call, and who sets the rules? You want your own outcome list, clear rules for each outcome (assign to a rep, retry, stop), meetings booked on your calendar, and follow-up messages sent only when the caller agreed to them. Ask how you change these rules without raising a ticket.

12. How does a live transfer to a human work, and what happens if nobody picks up? Ask what the caller hears during the transfer, how many numbers it tries, and what the lead record shows if the transfer fails.

Analytics and QA

13. What do I get for every call, and can I export it? At minimum you need the transcript, the recording (if you switch recording on), the outcome, the answers captured, and timings. Check that export works in a format your team can use.

14. How will I know a call went badly without listening to all of them? Ask whether the system flags problem calls on its own: long silences, the agent not hearing the caller, failed transfers, voicemails marked as “not interested”. Without that, quality checks mean random listening. See how to measure AI call quality.

Pricing

15. What is the billing pulse, and what counts as a billable minute? Per second, per 30 seconds, or per minute rounded up? With a per-minute pulse, a 61-second call costs two minutes. Ask whether ringing time, unanswered calls, voicemails and failed transfers are billed.

16. What else is on the bill? Monthly minimums, annual commitments, setup fees, number rental, DLT registration, charges for post-call analysis or transcription, WhatsApp message costs, and GST. Ask for a sample invoice for a month like yours.

17. How do retries affect cost? Unanswered leads get called again, and each attempt may carry a charge. Ask the vendor to model your volume. A useful number to compare vendors on:

Data and security

18. Who can hear our recordings and read transcripts, how long are they kept, and can we delete them? Ask which of the vendor’s staff can access call data and why, whether your own team’s access can be limited by role, the retention period, and how deletion works. This matters legally. Under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, the business that decides the purpose of processing (the data fiduciary) is responsible for processing done on its behalf by a data processor. It may engage a processor only under a valid contract, and it must make the processor erase data once the purpose is served or consent is withdrawn (unless the law requires keeping it). The DPDP Rules, notified on 14 November 2025, phase in over 18 months, so build this into the contract now.

19. Which security certifications do you actually hold? Show me. Logos on a website are not evidence. A SOC 2 is a report by a CPA firm, acting as service auditor, on controls relevant to security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality or privacy. Ask for the report and the period it covers. For ISO/IEC 27001, ask for the certificate, who issued it, its scope and its expiry. “In progress” or “our cloud provider is certified” is not the same as the vendor being certified.

Pilot design and exit

20. What does the pilot look like, how will we judge it, and how do we leave? A good pilot uses real leads from one source, runs for two to four weeks, and has one agreed metric, usually cost per qualified lead or bookings against your current process. Agree in advance how many calls you will listen to. For exit, get in writing: notice period, export of call logs, transcripts and recordings in a standard format, what happens to your numbers, and when your data is deleted.

The checklist on one page