Where is my order. Can I move my booking. How do I reset this. Work out what one contact costs you in salary, and how much of a month goes on the contacts that never needed a person.
Your support payroll is agents times salary. Divide it by the contacts those people handle in a month and you have the cost of one ticket — a number most teams have never put on paper, and the one that makes the rest of this readable.
Then take the share of your volume that is genuinely repetitive, and the share of that an assistant handles without a person: 80% to start with. Multiply what is left by the cost of a ticket.
payroll = agents * monthly_salary
cost_per_ticket = payroll / monthly_tickets
repetitive = monthly_tickets * (repetitive_percent / 100)
in_scope = repetitive * 0.8
monthly_cost = in_scope * cost_per_ticket80% is the top of the 70–80% range usually quoted for routine first-line contact. We have not measured it on your traffic, and we are not citing a study for it. It starts at the optimistic end because that is the number people quote; lower it in the panel above and watch what happens to the total. If the figure only works at 80%, it was never a very good figure.
One consequence worth stating plainly, because it looks like a fault: your ticket volume cancels out of the headline figure. It divides into the cost of a ticket and multiplies back out of the repetitive count, so the total is your payroll times the two percentages and nothing else. Type a different volume and the cost per ticket moves, the counts move, and the headline stays exactly where it was. That is the arithmetic being honest, not the page being stuck.
Nobody’s salary falls the month an assistant starts answering. The money in that headline figure is already being spent, and it keeps being spent — what changes is what those hours buy. The contacts that need judgment get answered properly. The queue at 9am on Monday stops being an event. The work that has been at the bottom of the list for a year gets done.
It becomes a saving only if you decide it should, by hiring more slowly than your volume grows or by redeploying people. That is a decision about your team, not an outcome of buying software, and any calculator that presents it as automatic is misleading you about how payroll works.
It cannot tell you which of your contacts are genuinely repetitive — you estimated that, and the estimate drives the whole figure. It cannot tell you that Tephlo answers all of them: an assistant answers from the content and the business data your workspace has prepared, and a question it has no grounds to answer is one it should hand to a person rather than guess at.
It also does not count what happens to the contacts a person still handles. Shorter queues and better context change those too, and none of that is in the number above.
Published plans each carry their own monthly conversation allowance. The comparison worth making is that allowance against the repetitive volume you just entered.