July 03, 2026
The phone line that hung up on customers — and the voice AI that fixed it in a day
Reporting live from CCW Las Vegas, CXM’s David Dungay sat down with Kyle Johnson, Chief Communications Officer at Nellis Auction, and Hakob, CEO and Founder of voice AI platform Synthflow, to talk about one of the fastest, least painful AI rollouts you’re likely to hear about this year.
Nellis Auction runs a returns liquidation auction business out of Las Vegas, and Kyle heads up its customer service operation. Around nine months ago, he went looking for a way to deal with rising call volume — and, in his own words, a phone line that had become a dead end.
“It literally just hung up on the customer,” Kyle told me. That was the starting point: not a sophisticated contact centre in need of optimisation, but a “bottom of the barrel” experience he was actively trying to escape. He wanted something more futuristic, and after some searching he landed on SynthFlow.
Live in a day, not nine months
SynthFlow is a conversational AI platform with a focus on voice AI, automating the interactions companies have with their customers. Hakob, the company’s founder, is clear about what sets it apart – speed to value.
Kyle’s account backs that up. “I promise they didn’t pay me to say this, but I literally think it took a day,” he said of the onboarding. The initial scope was deliberately narrow — a knowledge base uploaded and, crucially, an experience that didn’t involve hanging up on callers. Weekly meetings kept things moving, and the whole thing was up and running inside a day or two.
For Hakob, that smoothness is the product of a lot of work customers never see. “If you look behind in the kitchen, a lot has been going on,” he said. Bringing customers live within days or weeks — rather than the nine months, or even years, that the industry has often accepted as normal — is Synthflow’s core differentiator, and one it has now repeated many times.
There’s a deliberate filter, too. Synthflow chooses the customers it works with. “We don’t want to come across as a product, we want to come across as a partner,” Hakob explained.
Four of every five minutes
On outcomes, Kyle offered the metric that best captures the shift. Where a customer interaction once took five minutes, Synthflow now handles four of them.
The set-up he described is a genuine human-in-the-loop model rather than wholesale replacement: Synthflow does the collection work up front, a human agent makes the judgement calls at the middle point, and Synthflow handles the outbound follow-up. Kyle called it a “futuristic approach to customer service” — a long way from the dead-end line he started with.
That framing matters to Hakob, who is quick to steer the conversation back to the human outcome. “What really matters is the human experience,” he said. The futuristic technology is a means to an end; the end is customers who stay, renew and spend, and a business that grows. Going live quickly is simply removing an obstacle that never needed to be there. “It’s not rocket science — it’s just a matter of focus and vision.”
Advice for CX leaders weighing it up
Both had a clear message for CX leaders eyeing conversational AI but unsure where to start.
Kyle’s tip is to resist the fire hose. Plenty of vendors want to sell you the full grand solution up front, he warned. What worked for him was starting with exactly what he needed — “I started with A and I just wanted A” — and finding a partner happy to build from there as his own skill and appetite grew, with a product that could grow with him.
Hakob’s advice came in two parts. First, choose a partner, not a product or a vendor, because AI is a journey and you want someone on your side when you’re taking a risk on behalf of your team. Second, always start from outcomes. “You’re not automating for the sake of automation,” he said. Will it increase revenue, grow the business, make customers happier? Reverse-engineer everything from there.
