What an AI voice bot costs: what the price is made of and how to work out if it pays
"How much does it cost" is usually the first question, and the honest answer is that it depends on how much talking is done. A voice bot is priced by use, so what matters is not the price of a minute but the price of a result: what one qualified lead costs.
What the cost is made of
- Call minutes: the main part. You pay for time actually spent on calls.
- A phone number: the number the bot calls from and answers on.
- Setup and training: writing the script and the first tuning, by yourself or with the provider.
- Custom work: a connection to your CRM, a voice of your own, another language. As needed.
How minutes are counted
Look at how the provider counts. Some count by the second and some by the started minute. A call nobody answered usually costs nothing. In ENIGMA Voice Bot you buy packages of minutes in advance, outbound and inbound calls use the same package, and each call is counted per started minute. The larger the package, the lower the price of a minute.
The sum that really matters: cost per qualified lead
Take the figures of your own campaign and work it out like this: the minutes used, times the price of a minute, divided by the number of qualified leads you got. That is the number to compare with what a qualified lead costs you today, whether through a rep or through advertising.
An example for illustration only, not a real figure: if a campaign used 500 minutes and produced 20 qualified leads, each lead cost 25 minutes of calls. Your real numbers are in the report: minutes used, calls answered and qualified leads.
Compared with a human rep
A rep is paid by the hour, also when nobody picks up. A bot is paid by minutes actually spoken. That is why a bot pays off most at the filtering stage, where most of the time goes on calls that are not answered and on short conversations. At the closing stage, where every call is worth a lot, a person is still better. On this division, see lead qualification calls.
What lowers the cost
- A clean list: no wrong or repeated numbers.
- Good calling hours: more answers for the same number of tries.
- A short script: a filtering call of one to three minutes.
- A sharp definition of a lead: fewer long calls with people who do not fit.
We wrote about the first two in the best time to call leads.
Questions and answers
Do I pay for a call nobody answered?
In ENIGMA Voice Bot a call that was not answered uses no minutes, because what is counted is talking time.
Is there a monthly fee?
It varies between providers. With ENIGMA Voice Bot you buy packages of minutes in advance and use them until they run out.
What about setup costs?
You can write the training yourself at no cost. Script writing, connections to your systems and a voice of your own are offered as custom work, by quote.
See it working on your own leads
ENIGMA Voice Bot calls the leads in your file, rates each one from 1 to 5 and keeps the recording and the transcript of every call.