Every vendor has a number for this. Ignore all of them and work out yours — it takes about ten minutes and the answer is more useful.
The calculation
1. Count what it actually answered. Pull a week of conversations and count the ones where the agent resolved something you would otherwise have handled. Exclude your own testing.
2. Cost each one honestly. Not just the reply. A phone call about opening hours is two minutes of talking and considerably more of lost concentration if you were on a job. Interruption is most of the cost, and it is the part people forget.
3. Multiply.
Even at a deliberately conservative estimate, service businesses tend to find the repeat-question load is bigger than they thought — because they never counted it. It was just Tuesday.
The part that is not time saved
Some of what an agent produces is not saving you work, it is finding you work. An enquiry at 22:40 that you would never have received is not time saved; it is a job you did not have.
Count those separately. They are worth more, and mixing them into a time-saving figure understates both.
What it does not save
Anything requiring judgement. An unusual customer, a tricky quote, a complaint. These still need you, and they should — an agent that tries to handle them makes things worse.
Your first fortnight. You will spend time reading conversations and fixing content. That is real time, spent up front, and it is the reason the return starts in week two or three rather than day one.
The number that surprises people
It is rarely the volume. It is the distribution.
Look at when the conversations happen. If a meaningful share are outside your working hours, that is not time saved at all — those are enquiries that previously went unanswered. Different thing, bigger number.
A simple honest measure
Track two figures monthly:
- Repeat questions handled — what you did not have to answer
- Out-of-hours enquiries captured — what you would not have received
The first is time. The second is revenue. Reporting them as one number hides which is which.
Where the time actually goes instead
Worth being clear about, because it is not simply removed from your week.
Some of it becomes reading conversations, which is a genuine cost and also the highest-return twenty minutes available. Some becomes following up enquiries you did not previously receive — more work, and the good kind.
What disappears is the interruption: the third call this morning asking whether you cover a postcode.
The measure that convinces people
If you want a single number that survives scrutiny, use this one: enquiries received per 100 visits to your contact or pricing pages, measured before and after.
It uses data you already have, it is immune to arguments about how long a phone call takes, and it moves for exactly one reason — more of the people who wanted to reach you managed to.
Related: what missed enquiries cost.