AI calls that recover abandoned carts

Why call a shopper who left a cart?

Most carts are abandoned for a handful of reasons, and several of them are questions: will this size fit, when will it arrive, is cash on delivery available here, what if I don’t like it. A reminder email can repeat the cart. It can’t answer the question that stopped the purchase, and a short call can.

A call also costs more attention than an email, from you and from the shopper, so pick the carts worth it. A first-time buyer with a high cart value who entered a phone number at checkout is a good candidate. A repeat visitor who abandons carts weekly probably isn’t. You decide which carts reach the agent; it doesn’t choose for you.

Timing matters too. A shopper remembers the cart a few hours later and has forgotten it by next week. An always-on campaign lets your backend add each cart as it’s abandoned, and the agent calls inside the hours you set. A cart left at 1 a.m. waits for the morning window.

How do you set it up?

1. Write the agent in Agent Studio with a FACTS section: fit notes, delivery times, COD rules, the exchange policy. Tell it to say only what’s in FACTS, and to answer anything else with “मैं team से confirm करवा दूँगी” before moving on. A cart call goes wrong when the agent fills a gap with a guess, so leave it no gaps to fill.
2. Put the per-cart details in variables ({{cart_items}}, {{fit_note}}) so one agent serves every cart, and keep the cart id as extra info so it comes back in the webhook untouched.
3. Turn on analysis with a drop_off_reason field and a free-text reason field. Add your approved WhatsApp or SMS templates as analysis.templates. If they live in your messaging tool, the analysis can fetch the current list after each call instead of you typing them into the agent.
4. Add a pre-call tool that checks whether the cart has since become an order, with skip_call on the answer. Nobody wants a call about a cart they already paid for.
5. Test it in the browser. Play a suspicious shopper, a shopper who asks about a product you didn’t describe, and one who says “बाद में देखूँगी”.
6. Create an always-on campaign through the API with your calling window, one retry at most and a budget, then add carts from your backend with POST /v2/campaigns/{id}/contacts. Each call sends call.processed to your webhook with the analysis, the chosen template and your cart id.

Choose where the calls come from with some care. The Mirai shared line is shared with other customers and shows as Mirai, so a shopper who calls back reaches neither you nor the agent. Your own number, with an inbound agent assigned to it, catches those callbacks.

What should your team still handle?

Payment failures where money left the shopper’s account are a support case, and the agent should only take the details and promise a call from your team. Complaints about an earlier order go to support as well, and so do bulk or wholesale enquiries. Look through reason_in_their_words every week for a while. When the same objection keeps coming up, the fix is usually on the product page and needs nobody on the phone.

What should you check before calling shoppers?

An abandoned-cart call is closer to marketing than to service, so read the consent rules with that in mind. TRAI’s Third Amendment to the TCCCPR, notified on 18 September 2026, lets a sender contact someone on the basis of an inquiry for seven days after it, provided the inquiry was made in writing or through digital means and is kept in a verifiable form. Whether a saved cart counts as that kind of inquiry, or whether you need explicit consent collected at checkout, is a question for your own review with your telecom provider. A consent line at checkout, stored with a timestamp, makes the answer simpler.

The amendment also asks senders to declare software-placed calls, including those using artificial voice, to their telecom provider in advance with the numbers they’ll use, and it treats undeclared ones as unsolicited. Our own phone-number docs add a practical point: promotional calls from regular mobile numbers tend to get flagged more often than calls from the 140 series meant for promotion, and we don’t sell 140 numbers yet. For calling hours, check TRAI’s current rules and your consent records before you set the campaign window.

When a shopper asks you to stop, add the number to your do-not-call list that minute, from the webhook handler or from the campaign’s contact menu. Every campaign checks that list at dial time.

What does a cart call cost?

On T1 a connected minute costs ₹1 with a ₹1,00,000 monthly commitment, plus ₹0.30 for Mirai phone calling and ₹0.20 for call insights if you switch them on. On T5 it’s ₹5 a minute, pay as you go, with both included. Prices exclude GST. Only connected calls are billed, so a shopper who doesn’t pick up costs nothing. The cost block assumes about 110 seconds of connected time, which is an estimate for a call that answers one or two questions; a “no thanks” ends much sooner. Work out the economics per recovered order: the margin on a cart you win back against the cost of all the answered calls it took to win one. The cost calculator helps with that arithmetic, and Pricing lists the plans.