How Schottler & Simon uses telli to win against the industry's biggest players
- >90%
- containment rate on tenant hotlines for property managers
- 50–60%
- cost savings for Schottler & Simon's clients
- 100%
- reachability, 24/7, with no wait time
“Suddenly the business becomes scalable, without hiring more staff. Meanwhile, our clients save roughly 50–60% on costs.”
Dennis Schottler, Co-Founder & Managing Director at Schottler & Simon
About Schottler & Simon
Dennis Schottler and Daniela Simon founded Schottler & Simon in Berlin in 2008. Today 220 call center agents work for them worldwide. They also publish SQUT, an industry magazine on service, quality and technology. From IVR to predictive dialers, they've always been early adopters of new technology. Voice AI was no exception: they adopted it early and are among telli's first partners.
Challenge
Staying competitive as a mid-sized BPO in a changing market
According to Dennis, classic call center services alone no longer win business in Germany. Schottler & Simon faced two problems:
- 24/7, multilingual service wasn't affordable with human agents alone. Many customers need hotlines in 7+ languages, around the clock.
- Large tenders were out of reach. A mid-sized BPO that pays its agents fairly couldn't compete on price with providers of tens of thousands of employees. Meanwhile, many tenders now require an AI component.
After comparing German and US Voice AI providers, Schottler & Simon chose telli as its strategic partner to bring Voice AI to its clients.
“A few clicks, and we already had our first test agent ready.”
Solution
A hybrid model: Schottler & Simon × telli
Voice agents handle repetitive tasks, while call center agents focus on creating value where the human touch is needed. When it comes to implementation, Dennis never starts with a use case that people haven't handled first. The call center agents gather knowledge and experience from real calls, which makes prompting a telli agent easy.
For a client in property management, telli voice agents:
- answer tenant calls 24/7, in multiple languages
- turn repair requests into tickets and automatically dispatch the right service provider
- schedule callbacks with technicians and building managers
The target is 80% containment. Special cases and callers who prefer a person go to the human team.
The agents' role has changed with it: they've become trainers and quality checkers for the voice agents. For writing and tuning those agents, Dennis relies on Charlie, telli's AI assistant for building and improving agents.
“What used to take time was fine-tuning, improving and finding errors. With Charlie, I have a really good sparring partner.”
Results
Higher margins for Schottler & Simon, lower costs for their clients
On tenant hotlines, telli now resolves over 90% of calls without a human, with 100% reachability and no waiting time. Some callers even prefer the voice agent: it speaks their language and gets them there faster.
For Schottler & Simon, margins on Voice AI projects are higher while clients save 50–60%.
Outlook
New, bigger projects for Schottler & Simon
With telli, Schottler & Simon now wins tenders against BPOs 100 times its size.
“In the past we had little chance. Today we win these tenders.”
Most recently, the partnership helped bring in a major automotive client. The next project, a telli outbound agent that books test drives for dealerships across Europe, rolls out by the end of the year.
Dennis's advice for other call centers:
“A voice bot is like a new employee. It needs to be trained, coached, monitored and developed. Other than that: go for it, better today than tomorrow.”
