Part 1 – Voice Bots

 

 

“It’s so expensive”. 

I have heard that time and again over the past months when talking to potential customers about AI. Let me put the question a different way. 

“Give me 17000 EUR I will give you at least 100000 EUR back within the first year – what do you say?”. 

“You’re just mad – that can only be a risky crazy investment”.

But it’s not … and in this blog series, I’ll show you why, based on real life use cases. It’s going to involve some maths, but only basic school stuff. And it will be a bit controversial …

 

Here’s our first equation:

Time = Money

Let’s start by working this equation out for human beings - the ones answering the calls, the emails and so on. We must make some assumptions too. 

Let’s start with the right-hand side of the equation for the humans:

Gross Pay per Month	3000 EUR
Employer Contributions	+ 600 EUR
Common Business Costs	+ 600 EUR
Total per Month	= 4200 EUR
Total per Year	= 50400 EUR

 

In Germany employer contributions are about 20% on top of gross pay.

What do I mean by Common Business Costs? Things like office rent, buying new PCs every so on, electricity, telephone, software, cleaning the office and so on. In short everything that needs to exist and be paid for so the company can exist and humans can actually work there, which can be attributed to all employees by some factor. Here I have assumed 20%. Sure – this may vary, but I think 600,- EUR per month is pretty reasonable.

Moving to the left-hand side of the equation - how much time do we get from an employee? Again, some assumptions, but reasonable ones:

Working days per year	250
Holiday days per year	- 30
Sick days per year	- 5
Actual Productive days per year	= 215

So using our first equation and some simple maths we get:

215 days per year = 50400 EUR

1 day = 234,32 EUR

Assuming an 8-hour day with no breaks and a 100% work rate during the 8 hours (you can decide whether that is reasonable!) we get:

1 hour = 29,29 EUR 
1 minute = 0,49 EUR

Now let’s get to our first use case. Typical conversations in contact centers for print media could be for the following use cases:

• I didn’t receive my newspaper

• I’m going on holiday, please don’t deliver my newspaper from / to (dates)

• Please send my newspaper to this address

Or for a technical support center in first level support, it could just simply be creating a ticket in the ticketing system containing the subject of the problem and some text describing the problem. And maybe reading out some FAQs which might help solve the problem.

Or for a restaurant, booking a table. Or booking an appointment at the doctor's practice. 

Almost every line of business has simple, trivial tasks that must be completed dozens or more times each day, the list just goes on and on.

These usually end up being typical 3-minute calls in a call center, handled by human beings. So each call handled by a human would cost:

1 call (3 minutes) = 1,47 EUR

A well-trained jtel AI Voice Bot can easily handle any of the above tasks. Let’s calculate what a 4 channel jtel Voice Bot would cost:

Speech Services (Speech Recognition and Text to Speech) per Month*	150 EUR
4 Licenses Voice Bot per Month	1326 EUR
Total per Month	1476 EUR

The cost of the speech services is approximate as it is impossible to calculate exactly - it’s based on the actual time the service is used for. For the speech recognition this is how long the bot is “listening” to the caller, and for the text to speech how long is it “speaking” to the caller. This figure is based on real voice bots in the field which are handling about 5000 calls per month, this figure will be good enough for our purposes as you will soon see.

Also, here we’re assuming that the customer doesn’t have a jtel system. For existing customers, the price would be even less - as not all of the licenses included above would be necessary. 

Let’s crunch some numbers:

Calls	Human	Bot
1	1,47 €	1.476,00 €
100	147,00 €	1.476,00 €
500	735,00 €	1.476,00 €
1000	1.470,00 €	1.476,00 €
2500	3.675,00 €	1.476,00 €
5000	7.350,00 €	1.476,00 €
10000	14.700,00 €	1.476,00 €

Woah! What's going on here? 

First of all, I am assuming the bot is stupid, and can only do one job. If only one call comes in per month, and that’s all the bot can do, then the total costs of the bot get applied to this one call. If two calls come in, then the figure is 50% of the total cost of the bot, and so on.

For the humans, I am assuming that for the rest of the day, they are going to be doing other things. So the cost of the human for just one call per month is 1,47 EUR, and for the bot it is a colossal 1476 EUR.

In the real-world things look different though. A jtel bot can handle thousands of calls per month. But humans can’t – and you can see that for yourself. Somewhere between 2500 and 5000 calls per month, we are clearly going to start needing more than one human, and above 10000 even more. Not so with the bot. 

Assuming an 8 hour day, and the same assumptions as for the human (no breaks – 100% productivity) the voice bot can handle 640 calls per day – or well over 13000 calls per month based on 21 working days. 

But in fact, the voice bot doesn’t need any breaks, and works 24 hours a day 365 days a year. It can actually handle a maximum of 1920 calls per day or a whopping 58400 calls per month or a simply ginormous 700.800 calls per year. 

Looking again at the graph, we can see that the cutover point is around about 1000 calls per month. So, if you have 1000 calls per month, then you can have the work done by the voice bot instead, and in doing so the bot has saved the humans 50 hours of work. 

Now comes the controversial bit. Based on our original equation: 

Time = Money

you get to choose what to do:

• Use the bot to literally print you more time so the human beings can do more productive and complex things instead

• Or use the bot to save you money, by having less human beings in the first place

I’m personally a fan of option 1 😊.

In conclusion: is it a mad risky crazy investment? 

Well, I think not. I think you’d be mad and crazy not to invest. Because you can always earn more money with hard work, but time is gone – forever.