Your Queue Is Crawling With Calls No Agent Wants to Touch. How Contact Center Leaders Use AI Agents to Clear the Infestation and Cut Handle Time.

If you grew up in Cincinnati like I did, you didn't call them roly-polies or potato bugs. You called them "pill bugs." You know, those little grey armored bugs children love to touch because it makes them curl into a perfect little ball.

I recently traveled back home and noticed they're gone. Not fewer. GONE. My daughter and I turned over all the same rocks I turned over when I was a kid looking for them and came up empty. Bummer.

Here's what we saw instead: lizards.

Cincinnati calls them Lazarus Lizards — an invasive species a 10-year-old from a wealthy family smuggled home from Italy in 1951 and released in his backyard. Seventy-some years later, their progeny are taking over the city.

What really bugs me (pun intended) is I think I'm sitting on a big story, but I can't prove the lizards ate all the pill bugs. I just know one thing appeared and the other vanished. I can see the beginning and the end, but I'm missing the plot that connects the two.

First, Can You See What's in Your Conversations?

Here's the uncomfortable truth: most contact center leaders have no idea what's clogging their queues. Billing questions, password resets, tech support, service hour inquiries routine, and non-sales calls that never turn into revenue. They're in there. But how many? And which ones could an AI agent have handled?

Roughly 91% of calls to businesses don't convert. The real question is which 91%.

You can't fix what you can't see and you never really get to watch nature do its work without a National Geographic documentary. I doubt my missing pill bugs warrant tasking a hi-def camera crew.

But your conversations warrant further investigation. Invoca's Signal AI listens to every call and tells you what actually happened: what people called about, what they wanted, what they said right before they converted or hung up.

Now those conversations become signals you can act on. Route high-intent buyers to your best agents. Feed conversion data back to Google and Meta so your bidding chases real revenue instead of raw call volume.

That's step one, using data to identify if you even have a containment problem, instead of turning over rocks and crossing your fingers.

Your First Line of Defense: AI Agents

So what reduces that mountain of non-sales calls to something manageable? Your AI agents contain it.

A pill bug's entire survival strategy is containment. It rolls into a sealed ball and the threat never gets past the shell. AI agents serve as that shield in the contact center.

An AI Voice Agent answers the call, understands intent, and resolves it without ever escalating to a human. AI Messaging Agents do the same over SMS, engaging form leads the instant a customer raises their hand helping that customer answer questions and book appointments.

The industry has a word for this: Digital Containment. It’s defined as the share of interactions your automated channels handle end to end. The better that ratio, the more your people are freed up for conversations that actually drive revenue.

The Superpower: PreSense

OK so let’s assume you’ve reduced your non-sales calls, now you can focus on handling relevant sales inquiries more effectively. That starts with empowering your AI agents. And what turns a “decent” agent into a great one? Context. 

Using customer journey data, PreSense primes your agents before the conversation starts, passing real-time digital context such as: who's calling, are they a new or repeat customer, what page or product they were looking at, and even why they're reaching out. The agent enters already knowing, instead of starting from scratch. No "can I get your account number" or "how can I help," but rather "I see you're looking to book an appointment, let me help you with that."

That head start is the difference between contained and escalated.

At one major TV provider, Invoca's pre-call data increased digital containment from 62% to 83% on dispute calls. And a national insurer used PreSense to get 22% more callers an initial quote in under a minute, while cutting average hold time 14%.

Nature leaves you guessing, Invoca doesn't

The pill bugs all vanished and I'll never know what got them. Your non-sales calls don't have to be a mystery. Signal AI reads what every conversation was really about, AI Voice and AI Messaging Agents contain the routine calls end to end, and PreSense gives both humans and AI the context needed to resolve or convert on the first try.

The payoff isn't just fewer calls hitting your team. It's higher digital containment, faster resolutions, and every interaction measured and tied straight back to the revenue and the media spend behind it.

The lizards won my backyard. Don't let the mystery win yours.

See what's hiding in your call volume — and how much of it Invoca can contain, convert, and tie straight back to revenue.

Request your demo to learn more→