Blog
Oct 31

Should Your Business Use Human or AI Appointment Setters

AI appointment setters are taking over the business world right now.  But is an AI appointment setter the right decision for your business?  There are several factors to look at when deciding whether or not to keep a human setter or make the move to AI.  The goal of this article is to help you decide which is right for you or your clients.

AI Appointment Setters Cost Analysis

The biggest draw toward AI setters is the cost savings.  It’s the same reason why most human-based setters are virtual now… it’s just cheaper.  With expense creep and inflation, most businesses are looking for clever ways to save money.  So how much can AI save you?  We built a calculator HERE that can help you calculate the cost differences.

Here are some parameters that the calculator looks at.

 

Try this Report for Your Business

 

Number of Leads

This number represents the current number of leads per month your company has on average.  Adding AI to the mix won’t change this number.  The goal of AI is to capitalize on the lead flow you already have, squeezing out more closed deals through setting more appointments.

Response Rate

Having a human setter means you’re sacrificing speed to lead to some degree.  Even if you have a well-orchestrated team of assistants, it’s unreasonable to require a 10-15 second average response time.  When a lead fills out a form or visits your website, that is their moment of peak interest.  Their interest starts depleting immediately as they wait.  Based on our closed study with some of our largest AI setter users at CloseBot, using AI to field the first messages resulted in an increase in response rate from the lead of about 25%.

Rate of Leads that Book Appointments

Not all leads that engage with your company will end up booking an appointment.  Results vary depending on your advertising message, industry and many other factors.  However, we have seen from our study that AI is able to convert at a 30% higher rate compared to human setters.  This is because the AI responds quickly and with high quality.  It is designed to keep contacts engaged no matter how much traffic it’s handling.  The scale is unlimited with AI and the response time won’t falter.  Humans on the other hand tend to be a bottleneck.  Even if you get a slight spike in traffic, it could be minutes or even hours before some leads get a response.  The longer it takes to get a lead to the booking stage, the less likely they will be to follow through with booking an appointment.

Monthly Cost of Existing Human Setters

The cost of human setters is going to outweigh the cost of AI no matter how you look at it.  In addition to the high cost of humans, the cost doesn’t scale well.  If a single person can handle 40 new leads per day, as soon as your average is higher than that, you need to hire and start training another.  So even if your lead volume increases by just 1%, you need to double your setter cost.  This isn’t how AI works.  With AI usage costs, it scales as you do.  No need to take the time to train it like you need to train new staff members either.

Value of One Closed Lead

This is another constant for your business, but it’s an important piece of information when determining what the cost difference is between having AI appointment setters vs human(s).  When you finally close a lead, how much is that customer worth to you over their lifetime?

Appointments Needed Per Closed Lead

This is another factor that stays constant.  AI is your setter.  In most cases it’s not going to be your closer.  Your closing rate depends on how capable your sales person is on the appointment in most cases.  In some cases, however, CloseBot is able to close deals.  But let’s ignore that possibility for the sake of calculating the potential.

 

Example Scenario

Let’s imagine you run a business that gets 35 leads per month from your web form.  Only 70% of these leads respond once your human setter steps in to engage with them.  Of these that do engage, 50% end up booking an appointment.  Your human setter costs you $1,000 per month and the value of one closed lead is $1,500.  Your sales person is pretty good and they convert 1 in every 3 appointments to a paying customer.  In this scenario, your income for that month would be almost double if you used an AI setter instead of a human setter 😳

Of course, this difference in income and expenses becomes more and more prevalent as we forecast one year of net earning differences.  Imagine your business made $60,000 last year, but making this one small change over to AI setters could earn you an additional $60,000 over the next 12 months!  You could hire a full time assistant for that cost… or go on a vacation every two months!  If you don’t think you can implement yourself, connect with one of our trained implementation experts to help you… you can’t afford not to.

 

Summary

AI appointment setters may be scary, but it’s exactly what your business needs to make it to the next level you’ve been dreaming of.  If you’re an agency who has multiple businesses under you that you manage, imagine how much they’d love you if you implemented this for them.  You get access to unlimited bots on our super plan as well as the ability to white label the CloseBot platform.  Join our free plan now to try it out for yourself!

 

Try this Report for Your Business