Analyzing Thoughtly's Calling Fees vs. Human Call Center Costs

Since there is no real financial or general channel anymore, and that this actually requires some feedback from you, I post this here. I still suggest that you include a finance/business case channel. -------- Torrey Leonard I'm looking into the business case now. I'm shocked! You seriously need to have a look at your pricing and compare that with what it costs to have a human call center agent doing the job. I get the definite impression that you haven't made that comparison. Let's have a look. A one minute call costs $0.009 x 10 = $0.09 . In a month there is a max of 173 hours to work (52 weeks / 12) * 40h per week. If a person works 8 h/day, it means that during that month there is a max of 173 x 8 x 60 = 83,040 minutes. (52 weeks / 12 months x 40 hours per week = 173h) Now look into a few variants of their "efficiency": - 20% of the time doing the job: 83,040 x 20% = 16,608 minutes per month. This would with your pricing per minute handling calls, costing 16,608 x $0.09 = $1,495 . - 40% of the time doing the job: Double $1,495 => $2,990 - 60% of the time doing the job: Triple $1,495 => $4,485 . - 80% of the time doing the job: Quadruple $1,495 => $5,980 . - 100% is not at all likely, so we can skip that. According to Glassdoor, a callcenter agent in the US makes $45,668 per year as a median salary, the average salary is about $4K lower per year. Per month the median salary would be $3,806. If you hire a call center agent in the Philippines you can easily find staff for $300 - $400 / month. In the Philippines, employers pay 13 months of salary each year, and also a minor amount of money to their national healthcare insurance called PhilHealth of 5% of the salary. On top of that there is an employer contribution to a home saving program called PAG-IBIG, which is providing Filipino employees with access to affordable housing loans and short-term loans. The employer contribution to this is 2% of the salary. A voluntary extra health insurance which I always pay is e.g. PhilCare which is about $200/year depending on what insurances the employer pays. (This I do to make sure that my employees come back to work as soon as possible if they get ill or if they have some accidents.) Let's calculate on the slightly higher salary $400/month ($300 is greedy beyond belief!). This would on a yearly basis mean: $400 x 13 x 1.05% x 1.02% + $200 = $5,770 ...which on a monthly basis boils down to $481. I don't see how the business case is profitable in any way. With a call center agent in: - the US, being busy calling during 60% of the time, the Thoughtly calling fees would be $4,485/month while a US based callcenter agent would cost $3,806 , while a Philippine based callcenter agent would cost $481. The Thoughtly calling fees would thereby be $679 MORE than a call center agent in the US and $4004 more with a callcenter agent in the Philippines. The break-even is at roughly 85% , which means that the calling fees for Thoughtly is even higher, close to the level of insanity, being not possible because an agent have some time between the calls. Either way, this would result in Thoughtly calling fees of $0.09 x 85% = $0.0765 per minute. That's not a strong business case because there is no gain. Why use an AI based service where you risk misinterpretions when there is no clear upside? In my opinion, to even be able to get a meeting with someone being responsible for customer services/support, the calling fees need to be at max 15% of a salary for a human being if using a US callcenter agent. It's not even comparable with a Philippine call center agent (and by the way, they have "language assimilation" courses so they sound more American than most Americans.) This would if so result in calling fees much lower than the current. With a max of 15%, leave very little for us to get some profitability. The current pricing of the Thoughtly calling fees seems absurd, to say the least! Am i calculating this correctly? (I have intentionally not included the costs for vacation days and sick days, because I don't know how many vacation/sick days you have in the US. It would probably result in an even more absurd cost calculation. I have not included the cost for the calling device, but I purchased that SW for minor cash so that's not really affecting the calculation. The overhead costs are not included either). Please explain what and how you were thinking. To me it seems that you haven't done a proper calculation of the calling fees in relation to what it would cost with human callcenter agents. I must be wrong. Please clear things out.