Philipp Baumanns
Customer Service Still Runs
#30 Philipp Baumanns - Customer Service Still Runs on Phone Calls: Reinventing It with Telli
· 00:46:37
In EP 30, we sit down with Philipp Baumanns, Co-Founder & COO at Telli, the YC-backed company rethinking how businesses run customer-facing operations.
The idea started from a very practical problem. While helping build Enpal’s heat pump business, Philipp and his co-founder saw teams repeat the same qualification, booking, and follow-up calls thousands of times. Most of the surrounding workflow had already been digitized. The actual customer conversation had not.
We discuss how Telli went from a few early pilot customers to serving large enterprises, why the team initially focused on outbound use cases, and what it takes to build infrastructure that can handle thousands of calls at scale.
Philipp also explains where Telli sees its real moat beyond the underlying voice models, why time-to-value matters as much as model quality, and why the long-term opportunity goes far beyond phone calls. The bigger ambition is to become the layer through which companies manage customer interactions across voice, WhatsApp, SMS, and eventually even personal agents.
We also talk about Telli’s internal tech stack, why coding tools are becoming a major cost line next to engineering salaries, how the company thinks about outcome-based pricing, what high-agency hiring actually looks like, and which conversations Philipp still believes should remain human.
A conversation about building from lived pain, scaling into a crowded market, and how the interface between companies and consumers may change over the next few years.