Best AI Voice Agents for CX: How to Evaluate Them

Vapi published a seven-criteria rubric for evaluating AI voice agents in customer experience, covering resolution, real-time voice quality, action-taking, escalation, model flexibility, lifecycle trust, and platform control. The guide argues containment and deflection overcount success, since contained callers may simply hang up, and cites ContactBabel data showing phone preference for complex interactions rose from 28% in 2018 to 47% in 2024. Vapi positions itself as a model-agnostic platform layer with configurable endpointing, interruption handling, and background denoising.