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3 min read
22nd Feb 2023
Every customer service leader’s in the same boat this year trying to cut costs. You already know AI automation is a fast, effective way to do this, but how do you calculate the savings you’ll make so you can put together a business case? Our handy savings calculator is your new best friend. To start making a satisfactory dent in this year’s budget, all you need are three key metrics to get started. (If you don’t have these ― don’t worry, you can use our benchmarks instead.)
To calculate the savings you can make for customer support this year, first note how many enquiries your customer support team deals with every month. Look at the volume of incoming calls, emails and live chats over the past six months and take the average monthly value. Move the slider on our savings calculator to reflect that metric.
Next, to show where huge savings can be made and calculate your return on investment (ROI), it helps to break down costs to an individual level. To do that, work out your cost per enquiry and put that figure into the top box of our savings calculator. If you don’t already use this metric, simply divide your total customer support costs per month by the number of customer queries (metric 1) to estimate it.
Failing that, use the average cost per enquiry in the UK, which is £3.80. It’s already in our savings calculator for you to use as a default if you need to.
Now, think about how many of your enquiries each month can be answered by one of our AI assistants to help you cut costs. Not every enquiry needs an agent response, so save their talent for where it’s needed ― when customers need a sympathetic ear or have an unusual query.
First, consider what hours of the day you currently operate. Do you wish you could offer a 24 hour service? If your contact centre is closed outside the hours of 9-5 like a lot of businesses, that’s 14 hours out of every 24 hour period when your customer support service isn’t running. Launch an AI assistant to cover the time you’re offline and it’s already taken on 58% of a new possible workload.
Let’s look at some other examples.
Using integrations to connect to the business systems you use to do tasks manually, your AI assistant can find any information, any time of the day or night, for any customer, even if it’s highly specific to one individual. It can handle all of these types of requests and more for you in seconds:
Considering your potential for a 24 hour service and using the list above, estimate the percentage of enquiries every month that could be automated, then put that metric into the second box on our savings calculator. A conservative estimate is 47%, which already appears in the calculator as your benchmark.
To help reduce customer support costs and make the most of the teams you’ve already got, you can use another metric in our savings calculator to show the resource you save per hour.
Roughly work out how much you pay your agents per hour and put that figure into the last box of our savings calculator to instantly tot up your monthly savings. £13.80 per hour is a healthy estimate for a standard customer service agent salary in the UK (including the training, equipment, holiday allowance, and other costs people often forget).
There’s likely no budget to hire more agents ― 2023 is set to be a tough year for customer support leaders, but with an advanced AI assistant on your team, there’s no need to. You can make the most of the skill and talent already in your teams and save your budget for other plans to increase revenue.
It takes just 15 minutes to launch an AI assistant on our platform and you don’t need any technical know-how to do it.
To make a business case for launching one, use our handy savings calculator to get a direct comparison of how much you spend now versus how much you’d save using an AI assistant:
What are you waiting for?