Call center cost calculator

How to read the result

The monthly range is the headline, but the line worth arguing over is the effective cost per booked appointment. It is the only figure that survives a change of pricing model, and it is the one that tells you whether a cheap per-minute rate is actually cheap or just cheap per minute while producing nothing.

Two conversion assumptions are baked in so the three models can be compared at all: a share of talk minutes that turns into a booked appointment, and a number of appointments a staffed seat produces in a month. They are stated inside the tool. They are planning defaults, and they are the first thing to replace with your own history if you have it -- a shop whose booking rate is half the default will see its per-minute and per-seat costs per appointment double, and its per-appointment pricing not move at all. That divergence is exactly why per-appointment pricing looks attractive to buyers who do not trust the conversion figures.

Watch the range width rather than the midpoint. When the low and high ends of a model are far apart, that model is sensitive to something you have not pinned down yet, and the quote you sign will land wherever that variable actually falls.

The in-house comparison, done without cheating

The comparison most buyers make is against hiring someone. Do it with the published wage rather than a remembered one:

That is the wage only. A seat also costs payroll tax, benefits, a phone system, a licence, a desk, a supervisor's attention, and cover for holidays, sickness and the fact that one person cannot staff twelve hours a day. A common planning shortcut is to multiply the base wage by somewhere between 1.25 and 1.4 to approximate all of that.

That multiplier is an assumption, not a published figure, and we are showing it rather than sourcing it. Applied to the published annual median it puts one fully loaded in-house seat somewhere in the region of fifty-six to sixty-three thousand dollars a year before any technology. Change the multiplier and the answer changes; that is the point of writing it down instead of burying it.

Then divide by the appointments that one seat actually produces, and compare against the per-appointment figure the estimator gave you. One in-house seat covers roughly forty working hours a week. Storm weeks are not forty-hour weeks.

Where this fits

• Call center outsourcing -- what is inside each pricing model, and which questions to ask before signing one.
• Build a call center -- the other side of the decision, if the in-house column wins.
• Pricing -- our published numbers, so you can check this estimator against a real quote.