{"id":17246,"date":"2025-12-16T12:43:25","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T12:43:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/voice.ai\/hub\/?p=17246"},"modified":"2025-12-16T12:43:26","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T12:43:26","slug":"ucaas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/voice.ai\/hub\/ai-voice-agents\/ucaas\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is UCaaS? Features, Benefits, and Practical Applications"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Picture your contact center juggling calls, VoIP sessions, messages, video conferencing, and shifting call queues across multiple tools while teams work from different places. That friction affects customer experience and workforce efficiency. How do you bring together telephony, cloud PBX, SIP trunking, team messaging, presence, CRM integration, APIs, and omnichannel routing on a single cloud platform that scales for remote work? This article shows how UCaaS can simplify, unify, and modernize your business communications while improving collaboration, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. This is where Voice AI’s AI voice agents<\/a> fit in: automating routine calls and preserving CRM handoffs to improve containment and reduce cost-to-serve while keeping audit trails intact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unified Communications as a Service<\/a> bundles your company\u2019s core calling, meeting, messaging, and collaboration tools into one cloud platform so teams can communicate consistently across devices and locations, without running the underlying servers. You get a single control plane for provisioning, security, and analytics, and a subscription model that scales capacity up or down as headcount and traffic change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Constraint-based: when compliance or latency demands<\/a> are strict, you pick a different architecture than when your priority is rapid rollout. Single-tenant deployments provide isolation and tighter integration with legacy on-premises systems, while multi-tenant platforms lower costs and simplify updates. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Hybrid combines those approaches, placing regulated functions on-premises and moving everyday collaboration to regional clouds to reduce round-trip times and meet audit requirements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Identify where the audio and metadata must live and what your identity stack requires. If you need custom routing tied into an in-house PBX or a CRM with proprietary fields, single tenancy, or edge appliances, make integration predictable. If you need a broad geographic reach quickly, multi-tenant clouds with distributed data centers and global peering can shorten call setup and improve resilience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pattern recognition: modern UCaaS platforms route media and signaling across a hybrid public cloud fabric and edge services, with session border controllers handling security and interoperability at the network edge. Clients connect via SIP or WebRTC<\/a>; codecs negotiate the best quality; and media may traverse media relays to avoid NAT issues. <\/p>\n\n\n\n SSO providers and role-based access control handle identity and policy enforcement, while recordings, transcripts, and logs are stored in region-aware object storage to meet data residency requirements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Providers use traffic shaping, codec adaptation, and monitoring probes across POPs to detect and route around congestion. Real-time diagnostics push device health, jitter, and packet loss telemetry into dashboards, enabling admins to triage a failing room system in minutes rather than days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Problem-first: feature lists are easy to publish, but the differentiator is how those features compose into workflows that reduce manual handoffs. Beyond voice, video, and chat, expect orchestration layers that tie presence to calendaring, automated provisioning APIs, compliance recording hooks, and analytics that turn raw events into:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Practical connectors matter: built-in CRM<\/a> syncs that push call context, prebuilt workforce management links, and low-code automation for license assignment eliminate routine tickets. Advanced capabilities now include edge noise suppression, speech-to-text tuned to industry vocabularies, and real-time sentiment signals that inform queue-routing decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most teams handle repetitive inbound calls with simple IVRs because they are familiar and require no new engineering. That works at low volume, but as call volume climbs, manuals and scripts leak: hold times balloon, agents chase context across screens, and expensive human time eats margin. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Teams find that AI voice agents centralize routine phone work through secure telephony connectors and CRM-preserving handoffs, raising containment rates, cutting cost-to-serve, and enabling human agents to focus on complex issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Confident stance: the market is growing and consolidating, but growth brings sharper product differentiation and new integration expectations. According to Microsoft Teams, the UCaaS market is expected to grow<\/a> from USD 15.8 billion in 2021 to USD 24.3 billion by 2026. That Microsoft Teams note from 2023 signals vendors are investing in richer stacks and deeper enterprise features to capture long-term subscriptions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The competitive landscape is adoption-driven\u2014over 70% of businesses have implemented UCaaS solutions to improve communication efficiency. This 2023 finding highlights why resellers and managed service providers are bundling vertical compliance, hardware kits, and migration services as key value offerings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Prioritize openness, not bells. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Choosing a UCaaS vendor is like hiring an orchestra conductor, not someone who rents instruments; you want someone who coordinates many specialists so the music sounds seamless. What comes next will reveal the practical trade-offs that determine whether your UCaaS delivers consistent service or just another set of fractured tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Omnichannel vs Multichannel Contact Center UCaaS runs over the internet<\/a>, moving signaling and media through cloud-hosted services so users experience phone, chat, and meetings as a single, always-on application. Behind the scenes, it stitches together call setup, media flows, identity, storage, and third-party integrations so a conversation can start on a mobile device and continue through automation, CRM, or a human agent without losing context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When you press call, the client sends a signaling request to an authentication endpoint, which verifies the user and returns routing instructions. The platform then negotiates a media session, encrypts packets, and establishes a direct media path or a proxied relay optimized for network conditions, using mechanisms such as:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Network helpers, such as NAT traversal services, ensure packets travel through firewalls, while jitter buffers and adaptive codecs smooth quality on poor links. Telemetry on packet loss, latency, and device health is captured in real time and fed into operational dashboards, enabling teams to resolve issues before users report problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A unified control plane maps a single identity<\/a> to every touchpoint, so presence, permissions, and call history follow the user across devices. Events flow into an internal message bus and outbound webhooks, making actions like “create a support ticket after call end” a trivial rule. That exact bus timestamps and tags every interaction, producing the metadata that powers search, automated summaries, and accurate routing decisions later in the customer journey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When a user switches networks or moves from Wi-Fi to cellular, the client renegotiates media with minimal interruption, preferring local breakout points when latency matters and relays when direct paths fail. Edge points cache credentials and short-lived tokens, so roaming and reconnecting occur without a complete re-authentication cycle, preserving call continuity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Push notifications and lightweight sync keep messaging consistent even when a device is asleep, reducing redundant reconnections and conserving battery life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most teams provision call flows with manual scripts because they are familiar and low-friction. That works at a small scale, but as volume rises, that familiarity becomes overhead: routing rules proliferate, handoffs lose context, and compliance checks become manual audits that slow response times. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Teams find that platforms like Voice AI<\/a> automate routine calls with no-code flows that preserve CRM fields, deploy in minutes to cloud or on-premises environments, and deliver measurable outcomes such as higher containment rates, lower cost-to-serve, and continuous multilingual availability, while keeping audit trails intact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Subscription pricing converts significant capital outlays into predictable operating expenses, allowing procurement to reserve capacity for seasonal peaks without incurring sunk hardware costs. Good vendors expose metering and forecasting APIs so finance can tie monthly spend to actual usage metrics, and SLAs usually include credits and regional failover commitments that matter when customers expect 24\/7 service. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For IT, this means shifting focus from hardware maintenance to policy, identity, and integration hygiene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Providers operate the compute and storage layers, but the relationship is a shared responsibility, with providers handling underlying patching, hardening, and physical data center security. At the same time, customers manage:<\/p>\n\n\n\n As enterprise adoption accelerates, vendors must demonstrate robust controls and certifications. Projections indicate that more than 70% of businesses will adopt UCaaS by 2025, prompting providers to standardize compliance and regional controls. Audit logs, encryption key policies, and secure key management have become routine requirements rather than optional features.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Integrations use modern APIs and event-driven webhooks to push call events, transcriptions, and tags into downstream systems in near-real time. A typical flow: the UCaaS platform emits a call-start event, the CRM connector enriches it with customer identifiers, an AI transcription job runs asynchronously and returns a searchable transcript, and the CRM updates the case with the outcome and recommended next steps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Connectors handle idempotency, retry logic, and schema mapping to prevent dropped webhooks from corrupting records. Think of it like an airport baggage system, where each piece is scanned, routed to the correct conveyor, and tracked until it reaches the correct carousel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Voice quality controls, recording retention policies, indexed transcripts, role-based access to recordings, and programmable call routing are the operational levers that determine cost and compliance. Live analytics that measure containment rate, average handle time, and speed-to-lead enable teams to iterate on routing rules quickly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Features that were previously separate add-ons, such as real-time transcription with custom vocabulary, are now delivered as pipeline stages that can be toggled per tenant to meet privacy or latency constraints. These are the controls that turn UCaaS from a toolset into an operational system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to Sipcom, the global UCaaS market is forecast to reach $24.8 billion by 2025<\/a>, signaling heavy vendor investment in:<\/p>\n\n\n\n That growth makes one question unavoidable: what hidden trade-offs are you accepting by choosing ease of rollout over control, and how will those trade-offs affect compliance, cost, and customer experience as you scale?<\/p>\n\n\n\n UCaaS usually wins when your priority is unified workflows, predictable operating costs, and fast feature rollout; legacy PBX or pure VoIP<\/a> still make sense when you need absolute on\u2011prem control, specific regulatory isolation, or ultra-low-latency routing. The path you choose affects procurement, IT headcount, and how quickly you can automate routine voice work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When should you pick simple VoIP over a full UCaaS suite?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why do many organizations migrate away from on\u2011prem PBX systems?<\/p>\n\n\n\n A helpful image is this: a PBX is a private tool chest kept in your building, robust but fixed; UCaaS is a fleet of tool trucks that arrive where work happens, but you must rely on the fleet operator for upkeep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most teams keep an on-prem PBX and bolt on SIP trunks or a hosted UC layer because it feels low risk and preserves existing dial plans. That familiar path works at first, but as queues grow and reporting demands rise, technical debt multiplies: integration scripts break, audits require manual reconciliation, and agent time is squandered on routine calls. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Teams find that platforms like enterprise-grade AI voice agents provide a practical bridge, automating repetitive inbound and outbound calls with no-code flows, preserving CRM fields and telephony handoffs, and delivering measurable outcomes such as higher containment, lower cost-to-serve, and 24\/7 multilingual coverage while meeting SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI, ISO, and GDPR controls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Think of PBX as owning a factory machine, VoIP as leasing a single-purpose robot, and UCaaS as subscribing to a managed assembly line with dashboards and automation. The right choice depends on who you want to maintain the machinery, how quickly you need new features, and how much control you insist on keeping. That decision feels technical on the surface, but it shapes how your people work every day, and that human cost is often the largest line item. The part that unsettles teams is what happens on day 91 after migration, when habits either snap into place or quietly unravel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You need a tight, staged plan: audit where you are, lock down requirements, pick vendors with clear integration playbooks, run a short, instrumented pilot, then roll out in phases with focused training and support. Follow specific tests and acceptance criteria so cutover is a controlled project, not a gamble.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Start with a systems inventory that matters, not a checklist you file away. Capture active extensions, PSTN trunks, SIP providers, CRM integrations, single sign-on domains, call flows, average and peak concurrent calls by queue, and the top 25 inbound call intents by frequency. I recommend a two-week telemetry window plus interviews with the ten highest-call-volume users to validate edge cases. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Produce three outputs from the audit, each with an owner and deadline: a readiness score (network, device health, licensing), a migration dependency map (what must move first), and a squeeze plan for legacy numbers or on-prem SBCs that cannot be decommissioned on day one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Decide what you will actually adopt, not what the vendor can sell you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Build a feature-priority matrix that links each capability to a business outcome and a measurable KPI, such as containment rate, average handle time, or lead response time. Limit the initial scope to the top 60% of value features; leave the long tail for phase two. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Require vendors to demonstrate the three highest-priority workflows in your environment, using your CRM and one standard phone model, under load. That forces realistic integration proofs and prevents scope creep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Create runbooks that are usable at 2 a.m., not aspirational white papers. Each procedural document should be three parts: an annotated diagram, a short checklist for the operator, and a rollback step. Include granular items such as DNS changes that affect E911, certificate rotation steps, and a verified contact list for 24\/7 support hotlines. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Version these runbooks in your repo so every change has an author, timestamp, and a tested signoff. Hold quarterly tabletop drills that simulate regional outages and CRM failures, and measure the time to restore full routing and reporting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Frame migration as a change program with milestones, not a one-off IT project. Run a 4 to 6-week pilot with a representative cohort, no more than 5 percent of users, and instrument everything: device health, call quality MOS, abandonment, and qualitative user sentiment. Use pilot feedback to refine training scripts and support playbooks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Note that 90% of companies report improved collaboration after adopting UCaaS, indicating that meaningful gains occur when adoption is managed deliberately. Prepare bite-sized learning: two 20-minute role-based sessions and a searchable FAQ that addresses common issues pilots encounter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Drive a single deadline for core workflows, with a staged exception process for specialized teams. When teams remain split across systems, context loss becomes a productivity tax. Assign a cross-functional adoption lead with authority to close down legacy flows, and track unified usage weekly until it hits your target adoption rate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Think of the migration like redirecting commuter traffic during a bridge rebuild; traffic must be rerouted in defined waves, or you create jams that persist long after the work is done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Scalability, reliability, security, support, cost, contract flexibility, and integration maturity are table stakes, but translate each into acceptance tests. Require vendors to run a simulated busy hour that mirrors your weekday peak with CRM enrichments and concurrent recordings enabled, then deliver the raw telemetry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ask for sample runbooks for failover, a list of prebuilt connectors and the fields they exchange, and live references from customers with similar compliance needs. Negotiate SLAs tied to remediation time and include credits for missed objectives, not vague uptime promises.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Test three categories and fail them fast: media path resilience under packet loss and jitter, webhook and CRM enrichment under dropped events, and compliance retention under legal hold. For webhooks, test idempotency by replaying identical events and verify your CRM does not create duplicate records. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For media, simulate 10 percent packet loss on edge links and measure reconnection behavior and MOS. Capture exact thresholds that trigger escalation and embed them in your runbooks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most teams route repetitive inbound calls to human agents because it is reliable and familiar, and that makes sense when volumes are low and nuances matter. As call volumes grow, hold times rise, and agents spend their time on repetitive work, which hides cost in salary and churn. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Teams find that platforms like Voice AI<\/a> offer no-code voice agents that automate routine call types, preserve CRM handoffs, and deploy in minutes, reducing cost-to-serve while maintaining full audit trails and compliance controls, such as SOC 2 and HIPAA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Select three leading KPIs tied to revenue or cost and instrument them before cutover, such as containment rate, average handle time, and speed-to-lead. Run a four-week baseline, then compare the first four weeks after pilot cutover. Expect to see measurable deltas in workflow time and headcount allocation, and use those deltas to build your business case for phase two. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Businesses that migrate to UCaaS can reduce communication costs by up to 30%, providing a valuable benchmark for finance teams to stress-test vendor proposals and set realistic targets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Require a 30-day proof of concept that includes a reversal clause, defined KPIs, and live incident reporting for every issue. If a vendor resists a reversal, treat it as a red flag. Demand that your vendor provide a documented API schema, a sample integration playbook for your CRM, and references to migrations completed in the last 12 months. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If those items are unavailable, the migration will require more time after go-live than before. If you’re tired of missed leads, overloaded contact center operations, and inconsistent customer experiences, Voice AI’s conversational voice agents<\/a> replace legacy call centers and IVR trees with self-hosted, real-time AI voice agents that sound human, respond instantly, and scale with your UCaaS and telephony stack. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For large businesses that need speed without ceding data control or compliance, Voice AI integrates with your CRM and call routing to ensure handoffs remain precise and audit trails remain intact. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Voice AI’s solution, AI voice agents<\/a>, integrates with UCaaS platforms to automate routine interactions, accelerate call routing, and free human agents to focus on higher-value tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSummary<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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What is Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nWhat is UCaaS? UCaaS Architecture Options<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
How Can You Decide Between These Approaches?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What is UCaaS? How UCaaS Works<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
How Do Providers Keep Calls Reliable at Scale?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Features of a UCaaS Technology Stack<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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What Makes Some Platforms Usable for Enterprise Teams?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Operational Cost of Simple IVR at Scale<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
The UCaaS Marketplace: Vendors, Providers, and Resellers<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
How Should Buyers Evaluate Providers Now?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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A Short Analogy to Keep This Concrete<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Related Reading<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\u2022 What Is ISDN
\u2022 Automated Voice Broadcasting
\u2022 What Is a PBX Phone System
\u2022 Customer Communication Management
\u2022 How Does a Virtual Phone Call Work
\u2022 Automated Outbound Calling
\u2022 UCaaS
\u2022 Hosted PBX System
\u2022 Automatic Phone Calls
\u2022 Contact Center Automation
\u2022 Callback Service
\u2022 Customer Support Automation
\u2022 IVR Customer Service
\u2022 Contact Center Compliance
\u2022 IP Telephony System
\u2022 What Is a Virtual Phone Number
\u2022 Customer Experience Management
\u2022 SIP Trunking VoIP
\u2022 VoIP Phone Number
\u2022 Conversational AI Adoption
\u2022 SaaS Call Center
\u2022 How VoIP Works Step by Step
\u2022 Contact Center Workforce Optimization
\u2022 Reduce Customer Attrition Rate
\u2022 Call Center Attrition
\u2022 Customer Experience Lifecycle
\u2022 Business Communications Management
\u2022 SIP Phone
\u2022 Predictive Dialer vs Auto Dialer
\u2022 What Is SIP Calling
\u2022 PABX Telephone System
\u2022 Hosted VoIP
\u2022 How Much Do Answering Services Charge
\u2022 Cloud-Based Contact Center<\/p>\n\n\n\nHow does Unified Communications as a Service work?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nHow Does IP-Based Communication Move Voice and Video?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Proactive Voice Quality Management<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
What Does a Unified Platform Really Do for Workflows?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
How Do Devices and Locations Stay Reliable as People Move?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Cost of Scaling Manual Call Flows<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Automated No-Code Flows for Scalability<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Why Does the Subscription Model Matter for Procurement and IT?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Who Runs and Secures the Cloud Servers That Hold Your Calls and Data?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Compliance Drives UCaaS Adoption<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
How Do Integrations Connect UCaaS to CRMs, Ticketing, and Analytics?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What Operational Features Matter Day to Day?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Connectors, Security, Automation<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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UCaaS vs. Other Communication Technologies<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nUCaaS vs. CCaaS<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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VoIP vs. UCaaS<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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UCaaS vs. PBX<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Cost, Scalability, Maintenance, Flexibility, and Features Compared<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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A Common Way Teams Try to Bridge Old and New, and Why It Fails<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Compliance-Ready Bridge<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Operational Tradeoffs You Should Test Before Committing<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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A Quick Analogy to Make the Choice Practical<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
According to Gartner, UCaaS is projected to grow 25% annually, reaching a $24 billion market by 2025, as buyers increasingly favor cloud-first solutions, reshaping negotiation leverage and migration strategies.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat Matters Most When You Choose<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\nRelated Reading<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Best Practices to Move to UCaaS<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n1. Audit Your Existing Business Communication Tools<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
2. UCaaS is Not One-Size-Fits-All<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
3. Document, Document, Document<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
4. Inform and Engage Your Team<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
5. Don\u2019t Forget About the \u2018Unified\u2019 Part of UCaaS<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What Should You Look for When Comparing UCaaS Providers?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
How Do You Plan the Migration Timeline and Governance?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Which Integration Tests Actually Matter?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Status Quo Disruption: How Teams Handle Routine Phone Work, Why It Breaks, and One Practical Bridge<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
How Should Training and Support Be Structured?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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How Do You Measure ROI and Show Value Fast?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
A Final Practical Test Before You Sign<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The frustrating part? This isn’t even the most complex piece to figure out.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBook a Demo to Learn About Our AI Call Receptionists<\/h2>\n\n\n\n