Loading article
The Challenge
Trucking runs on phone calls. Over 95% of US carriers have fewer than 10 trucks, and no broker or system of record dominates. Every truckload gets manually booked over the phone.
TruckSmarter recognized that voice AI could do what no broker had: create a system of record for truckloads. Voice agents could collect load information, book loads, and even negotiate rates; this work used to require a human calling for every single load. For tens of thousands of small carriers on the platform, that's hours back that they could spend with their family instead.
TruckSmarter’s initial exploration of voice showed promise. At scale, it hit significant roadblocks:
At scale, the promise of voice AI wasn’t meeting TruckSmarter’s production requirements. They reached out to Phonic and partnered together on a voice solution that was able to serve their production needs.
The Solution
One demo was enough for Nipun Dave, VP Engineering @ TruckSmarter, to greenlight a POC. Three reasons stood out:
To get started, TruckSmarter was able to share a trove of existing calls where the agent was and wasn’t performing, which Phonic could use as training data to optimize the performance.
"It was exciting from a partnership standpoint because we did end up working a lot together in terms of A/B testing the two setups and then working with you all to identify what's working well, what were the gaps, and then you guys helped bridge those gaps fairly quickly."
Nipun Dave
VP Engineering, TruckSmarter
Phonic worked with the TruckSmarter team to migrate their agents from Retell to Phonic and help tune agent performance towards their goals. This included, but was not limited to, fine-tuning voice models for TruckSmarter specific jargon.
Within a few weeks, Phonic's voice agents were delivering higher end-to-end success rates compared to the alternatives. Its speech-native stack meant structurally lower latencies and a better handling of industry-specific jargon. And because Phonic's SDK was built for multipurpose voice agents rather than a narrow customer-support use case, TruckSmarter could extend the agents from obtaining information to negotiating loads on its own.
"Now we have a voice agent that's a lot smarter than what I think we would have been able to set up somewhere else using one of the other providers."
Nipun Dave
VP Engineering, TruckSmarter
Throughout both the POC and being in production since, Phonic helped deliver a superior voice experience compared to the competition. Nipun remarked on how excellent it was to work with the Phonic team:
"You guys are very responsive. Good clarity of thought, and the important other point being if you think you can commit to something, you say so. If you can't commit to something, then you're transparent on that front. So you weren't typical sales guys."
Nipun Dave
VP Engineering, TruckSmarter
The Outcome
Since adopting Phonic, TruckSmarter has seen:
"By the end of it, the call success rates improved, and that's why we started sending more of the calls to Phonic than other providers. And then for some products, there's no other provider — we are just using Phonic directly because you guys provide certain capabilities that others don't."
Nipun Dave
VP Engineering, TruckSmarter
