Most businesses lose calls in both directions
There are two ways a phone quietly costs you money. Inbound: calls ring out after hours, during a rush, or while you are on another line, and that customer simply calls the next business. Outbound: an enquiry lands from an ad or your website, but nobody rings back for hours, so the lead goes cold. Hiring people for both is expensive, and most tools solve only one side. You end up with a receptionist app that answers but never calls, or a dialler that calls but never picks up. What you actually need is one agent that owns the phone in both directions, so no call and no enquiry falls through.
One calling agent, inbound and outbound
Dvaarik runs a single AI calling agent that answers every inbound call and places outbound calls to your own leads. On inbound it greets the caller, understands what they want in their language, answers from your prices and policies, books the slot, and sends a WhatsApp confirmation. On outbound it rings a fresh enquiry within about 60 seconds, qualifies budget and intent, books the next step, and writes the outcome to your lead sheet. It is the same agent with the same knowledge, so a caller and a called-back lead hear identical answers. The agent identifies your business at the start of every call, and outbound only ever dials your own leads and enquiries, never purchased or cold lists, within calling hours you set.
Honest, permanent ₹2/min pricing
Voice is from ₹2 per minute with simple whole-minute billing, and that ₹2 is a permanent base rate, not an introductory discount that expires. There is no voice subscription and no per-seat fee: you load prepaid credits and both inbound and outbound calls draw from the same balance. Setup is ₹0 for every business, there is no minimum commitment, top-ups start at ₹500, and credits never expire. The recurring charges that do exist are optional and stated plainly: a phone line at ₹1,500 per 30 days per concurrent call line with the number included, and the Social Plan at ₹1,500 per 30 days for the WhatsApp and Instagram agents plus campaigns — both debited from credits.
What actually happens in the 60 seconds after a lead comes in
Speed-to-lead is quoted so often that the mechanics get skipped, so here they are in order. Your ad, website form or landing page posts the enquiry to us as soon as it is submitted. The agent places the call — in practice within about 60 seconds of the enquiry landing, not of the person filling it in, and the gap between those two things is your form's redirect, not ours. If the lead picks up, the agent identifies your business by name in the first sentence, confirms it is speaking to the person who enquired, asks the two or three qualifying questions you chose, and either books the next step in your calendar or hands the call to a human if one is available. If the lead does not pick up, the agent does not redial immediately; it waits, retries on the schedule you set, and after the last attempt sends a WhatsApp message instead so the enquiry is not abandoned. Every outcome — connected, no answer, wrong number, not interested, booked — is written to your lead sheet with a timestamp and the transcript. The reason this beats a human on the same task is not intelligence. It is that a human doing this well has to be free at the moment the enquiry lands, and nobody is free at 9:40pm on a Sunday.
Connect rates, and why per-minute pricing is only half your real cost
This is the number most vendors leave out of the arithmetic, including in comparisons that are otherwise fair. On outbound you are not buying conversations, you are buying dialling attempts, and only some of them connect. If your connect rate is 40%, then ten dials produce four conversations, and the cost of a conversation is the cost of 2.5 dials, not one. That ratio moves your effective cost far more than a rupee of difference in the per-minute rate does.
Two things follow. First, ask any vendor plainly whether you are billed for dialling attempts or only for connected minutes — the answer changes the sum, and it is a fair question that a straight answer costs nothing. At Dvaarik the meter runs on live call time; a ring-out that nobody answers is not a billed minute. Second, treat your own connect rate as the lever, because it is the one you control. Fresh leads connect far better than old ones, which is the entire argument for calling in 60 seconds rather than the next morning; calls placed in the hours your customers are actually free connect better than calls placed when it suits your office; and a number your customer half-recognises connects better than an unfamiliar one.
We do not publish an average connect rate, because we have not measured one across enough client books to stand behind it, and a made-up benchmark here would flatter us at your expense. What we will do is show you yours from your own first month of calls, alongside the cost per connected conversation that falls out of it.
Consent, calling hours and what we will not call
Outbound is the side of calling where the rules matter, and where a vendor who will not discuss them is telling you something. We call your own leads and your own customers — people who contacted you, bought from you, or asked to be contacted. We do not call purchased lists, scraped numbers, or databases of any kind, and this is not a policy we will negotiate on a large enough order. The reason is practical as much as principled: calling strangers is what gets numbers reported, and a reported number stops working for the customers who do want to hear from you.
You set the calling window, and the agent respects it including on the retry schedule, so a lead that arrives at 11pm is called when your window opens rather than at 11pm. Every call identifies your business at the start rather than opening with a question, and a person who asks not to be called again is marked and not called again — across every campaign, not only the one the request arrived on. Calls are recorded only if you switch recording on, and recording adds ₹0.10/min on top of the ₹2/min base rate.
The wider legal position on automated calling in India — TRAI, DLT registration, the 140 and 1600 number series, and what does and does not apply to an AI agent calling your own leads — is set out separately in [is AI calling legal in India](/blog/is-ai-calling-legal-in-india-2026). It is worth twenty minutes before you launch a campaign, particularly if someone has told you that you need DLT registration for something that is not SMS.
When an AI calling agent is the wrong purchase
Four situations where we would tell you not to buy this, because finding out later is expensive for both of us.
**Your call volume is genuinely low.** If you take fifteen calls a week and answer most of them, an agent will not pay for itself and a good voicemail-to-WhatsApp flow will do. The honest threshold is not a number we can set for you — it is the point where the calls you currently miss are worth more than the monthly total on your own volume, which you can work out on the [AI voice agent cost calculator](/blog/ai-voice-agent-cost-calculator-india).
**Your calls are long, technical negotiations.** A twenty-minute conversation about a custom industrial order, with pricing that depends on judgement, is a human's job. The agent is strong at the repeatable front half — who is calling, what do they want, are they qualified, when can they come in — and it should hand over rather than improvise.
**Your receivables problem is twenty large invoices, not two hundred small ones.** Chasing a handful of significant accounts is relationship work. Automated reminder calls make sense on a long tail; the arithmetic for that specific case is in [what AI payment reminder calls cost](/blog/ai-payment-reminder-calls-india-cost).
**You want to call people who never contacted you.** We have said this above and we will say it again here, because it is the single most common request we decline.
How this differs from an IVR, a dialler and a call centre
These four things get sold as alternatives to each other and they are not the same purchase.
| | What it does | Where it fails |
| --- | --- | --- |
| IVR / phone menu | Routes a caller by keypress to a queue or a person | It does not answer anything. If nobody is at the end of the queue, the caller has pressed three buttons to reach the same silence |
| Auto-dialler | Places outbound calls in bulk and connects answered ones to an agent | It needs the agent to exist. The dialler is only as available as the people sitting behind it |
| Call centre / answering service | People answer in your name, to a script | Works well, costs per seat per shift, and 24/7 cover means paying for three shifts. Quality depends on staff turnover |
| AI calling agent | Answers inbound and places outbound, from your prices and policies, in your customer's language | It should hand over on anything that needs judgement, and it is only as good as the knowledge you give it |
The comparison that matters for most Indian small businesses is the third row against the fourth, and it is not really about capability. A call centre bills for time booked; an agent bills for time used. If your calls are spiky — a rush at 11am, nothing at 3pm, enquiries at 10pm — you pay a call centre for the quiet hours and you do not pay us for them. If your call volume is steady and heavy all day, that arithmetic narrows considerably, and at genuinely large volumes with complex calls a trained team is the better buy. The detailed cost comparison against hiring a person is worked through in [AI vs human receptionist cost in India](/cost/ai-vs-human-receptionist-cost-india).
What it takes on your side to go live
The platform does the assembly; the inputs are yours, and this is the honest list of what setup will ask of you, because the launches that stall are the ones where nobody knew this in advance.
**Your answers, not your documents.** The most useful thing you can load is the twenty questions your customers actually ask on the phone, with the answers you would give — prices, timings, what you do not do, what you charge extra for. Most businesses have this in someone's head rather than on paper, and half an hour with the dashboard open gets it out.
**A decision about the number.** Either you route your existing line to the agent, which keeps the number on your signboard working, or we supply one as part of a phone line at ₹1,500 per 30 days per concurrent call line, number included, auto-debited from your credits.
**Where the outcomes should land.** A Google Sheet is fine and is what most businesses start on. A CRM is fine too. What matters is that there is one place where a lead's status lives, because an agent that books perfectly into a system nobody opens has not helped.
**Somebody to escalate to.** Not a rota — just a number the agent can transfer to when a call needs a person, and an answer for what should happen when that number does not pick up.
With those four things, your agent is ready the same day you finish setup, and a supplied phone line is usually connected within a day. Setup is ₹0 for every business, with no conditions attached.
What a real calling day looks like
Say you run a clinic. Overnight, three people call about availability: the agent answers each one, books two, and takes a message from the third for staff. In the morning, a Google ad sends a new enquiry; the agent calls that person back inside a minute, confirms the concern, and books them for the afternoon. A regular patient calls during the lunch rush while your front desk is busy, and instead of a missed call they get an instant answer and a reminder on WhatsApp. You did nothing except read the summary. Every inbound call answered, every fresh lead called, one agent, all of it drawn from the same prepaid credits at ₹2/min.