AI calls to confirm cash-on-delivery orders

Why does COD confirmation suit an agent?

A cash-on-delivery order is a promise the customer hasn’t paid for yet. Some get placed twice, some by mistake, and some carry an address the courier will never find. A short call before you pack the parcel catches these while they still cost nothing to fix.

The call goes the same way every time: who’s calling, what was ordered, the amount, the address, then yes or no. Your team can make it, but by the fiftieth order of the afternoon nobody reads the address back carefully any more. The agent reads it back on every call, in whichever of Hindi, Hinglish or English the customer answers in.

What it does on the call is narrow on purpose. It confirms the order. If the customer wants to cancel, it asks why once, records the answer and doesn’t argue. If the address is wrong, it takes the correction and reads it back until the customer says it’s right. When someone asks a question the agent wasn’t given an answer to, like an exact delivery date your system doesn’t know yet, it says so and moves on. It answers only from the details you send with each order.

How do you set it up?

1. Open the sandbox. You can look around without signing up; the console asks for a work email the first time you test or create something.
2. In Agent Studio, write a short prompt that uses your order columns as placeholders: {{customer_name}}, {{items}}, {{order_value}}, {{delivery_address}}. Put the AI disclosure in the agent’s first line.
3. Turn on call analysis and list the fields you want back, such as an order_decision with the values confirmed, cancelled, address_changed or no_decision, plus corrected_address and cancel_reason. The names are yours. They come back under analysis.data.
4. Press Test your agent and talk to it in the browser. Try a cancellation, a messy address, and a customer who says “हाँ हाँ” to everything.
5. For a daily batch, open Campaigns, choose the agent and the calling hours, download the template and upload the day’s COD export. The Columns step maps your export’s own headings, and a column you mark as extra info, such as an internal order reference, travels with the call without ever being read to the customer. The preview lists every row it can’t use before anything is created.
6. To call each order as it’s placed instead, keep one always-on campaign open and add orders from your store’s backend through the campaign contacts API. An order added inside the calling window is called straight away. One placed at midnight waits for the window to open.
7. Give the campaign a webhook URL. Each call ends with one call.processed event carrying the transcript, the analysis and your extra info, so your handler can mark the order confirmed, cancelled or on hold for a new address.
8. When the test calls sound right, complete Go live in the console.

One more setting saves some awkward calls. A pre-call tool can ask your system whether the order is still open just before dialling, and the skip_call builtin stops the call if the customer already cancelled on the website. A skipped call isn’t dialled and isn’t charged.

Which orders should a person still call?

Keep high-value orders for your team, along with customers who have refused COD parcels before and anyone who has complained recently. Add every call that ended with no_decision or with analysis.success false, which usually means the customer hung up halfway or the address never got confirmed. In the console you can filter a campaign’s contacts by result and work through that list by hand.

The agent can’t transfer a call to a person today. When a customer insists on speaking to someone, the prompt should have the agent promise a callback and note it, and then your team makes that call.

What should you check before the first call?

TRAI’s Third Amendment to the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, notified on 18 September 2026, describes a service call as one that gives customers information about a product or service they have bought, including information about delivery, and says such calls are not promotional and don’t need explicit consent. A confirmation call that also pushes a discount or another product is a different kind of call. Keep offers out of this script.

The same amendment asks every sender to declare application-to-person calls to its originating telecom provider in advance, along with the calling numbers it will use. It defines those as calls started by software without a person dialling, and it names artificial voice technology. A call of this kind made without the declaration is treated as unsolicited commercial communication. The amendment comes into force in stages after its publication, so confirm where it stands with your telecom provider.

Some checks stay with you whichever number you call from. We don’t scrub your list against the national DND register, and the consent records are yours to keep. A campaign never dials outside the hours you set, but choosing those hours is your decision: check TRAI’s current rules and your consent records. A customer who says “मुझे call मत करो” belongs on your do-not-call list, which you can add to from the campaign’s contact menu or from your webhook handler.

What does a confirmation 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. You pay only for calls that connect. A call that rings out, is busy or fails costs nothing, and a campaign retries it if you allowed retries. Voicemail is billed, because audio went out. The cost block on this page assumes a connected call of about 80 seconds, which is an estimate: a clean “हाँ, confirm कर दो” ends sooner and an address correction runs longer.

The useful comparison is per order. Set the cost of one answered call against what you lose when a parcel goes out, gets refused at the door and comes back. Pricing has the plans, and the cost calculator works through your own order volumes.