ROI calculator

What the agent is actually worth.

Not a smaller team — a bigger one, without hiring. Put in your volume; we'll price the hours the agent hands back against the plan your traffic lands on.

Every assumption is sourced and editable. Nothing asks for your email.

Customer conversations a month
1,200

Across every channel. That's about 9,600 incoming messages — the unit Cloodot meters.

Share the agent handles end-to-end
30%

Closed without a person touching them. 30% is where an untuned agent lands.

What one person costs you a year

Salary plus benefits and payroll taxes — the loaded cost, not the offer letter.

  • $30an hour of loaded payroll
  • 2.0 minof paid time per conversation
Assumptions

The constants behind the number. Your own analytics beats every one of them — overrule away.

Minutes to handle one conversation
6 min

At 3 at a time, that is 2.0 minutes of paid time per conversation.

Conversations handled at once
3

Threads one person runs in parallel. A higher number flatters us, so it starts low.

Share arriving outside working hours
30%

Your own inbox timestamps beat every published figure for this one.

Share of those that are new business you lose
5%

The thin slice of out-of-hours messages that are new enquiries going elsewhere first — most are existing customers, happy to wait. Only used if you price a customer.

Sources

Where every number came from.

The defaults, and why

AssumptionStarts atWhyConfidence
What one person costs a year$62,000Median US customer-service pay is $44,770; benefits and payroll taxes add 29.7%. The loaded cost is what finance counts, not the salary line.US Bureau of Labor Statistics — OOH (May 2025) and ECEC (June 2025)High
Share the agent handles end-to-end30%Deliberately low. Vendors publish 60–80%; public case studies run 26–56%. A tuned agent on narrow work beats 30% — that is the upside, not the promise.Metrigy 2024–25 study; published Gorgias case studies; Intercom’s own guidance to new customersMedium
Minutes to handle one conversation6 minutesThe middle of the 6–7 minutes reported for chat and messaging. Your analytics has the real number.Cross-industry customer-service benchmarking, 2024–25Medium
Conversations handled at once3Two to three threads at once is typical; high performers reach six. It divides handle time, so a higher number would flatter us.Live-chat concurrency benchmarks (HDI, Comm100, Call Centre Helper), 2022–25Medium
Share arriving out of hours30%Published figures run 40–60%, none traceable to a primary study, so we start below the range. Your inbox timestamps beat all of it.Vendor and vertical reports, 2024–26 — no primary study locatedIllustrative

Primary sources

And five we threw out

Each of these circulates widely in this category. Each broke when we chased it to its source, and none is in the arithmetic above.

  • “WhatsApp has a 98% open rate” (and the identical 98% for SMS)

    Two unrelated channels, the same round number, no study behind either. The best real measurement puts WhatsApp nearer 79%.

  • “AI deflects 45% of queries but only 14% are fully resolved”

    Gartner's 14% is real. The 45% comes from the same survey but counts people who felt misunderstood; aggregators stitched the two into a statistic Gartner never published.

  • “Reply in 5 minutes and you are 21× more likely to qualify a lead”

    A vendor-funded 2007 study, never peer-reviewed, routinely misattributed to a 2011 Harvard Business Review article. Nineteen years old, and about outbound phone calls.

  • “Poor customer service costs US businesses $75 billion a year”

    A decade-old round number with no locatable source. Impressive, unusable.

  • “62% of small business calls go unanswered”

    Three mutually exclusive attributions for one figure, one of them a survey of 85 businesses. Copied, not measured.

The awkward questions.

Why start at 30% automation when vendors advertise 80%?
Because 30% is roughly where a new deployment lands before anyone tunes it — published case studies run 26–56%. Narrow, well-documented work goes far higher, and the slider goes with it. A page that opens at 80% sells the ceiling as the floor.
What exactly counts as a conversation?
One customer thread on any channel — a WhatsApp exchange, an Instagram DM, a webchat session. Plan fit assumes about eight incoming messages per thread, because Cloodot meters messages, not threads.
Is the revenue figure your estimate or mine?
Yours. It ships switched off and supplies no multiplier of its own: you enter what a customer is worth and what share you lose, and it multiplies. The usual lead-response multipliers trace back to a vendor-funded 2007 study.
Does the plan price here match what I would actually pay?
Yes — read from the same live catalog that drives the pricing page and checkout, at the monthly rate. Annual billing is cheaper, so the real payback is better.
What is not counted here?
Against us: setup time, writing the agent's instructions, and Meta's per-message WhatsApp charges, which Meta bills you directly.
Numbers add up?

Find out on your
own inbox.

Point the agent at your own content, watch a week of real conversations, and measure its share against the 30% this page assumed.

Start free →See the plans