What does a call actually cost, beyond the price?

The price you are charged for a call is the number everyone tracks, and it is real, but it is not the whole cost. An agent's time answering, talking, and following up on that call has a cost too, and if you never add it in, two campaigns with the same sticker price can be very different deals.

The price you are billed

On Callmart, pricing is per connected call, in tiers tied to a buffer, a minimum connected-time threshold measured in seconds after your destination number answers. Ringing time is not counted, and a call is billed once, when connected time reaches or passes the buffer you selected for that campaign. Calls that are not answered, or that end before the buffer, are not billed. That billed price is your starting point, not your ending point.

Add the time cost

An agent's paid time on a call, including the calls that do not cross your buffer and are not billed, still costs you something in staffing. If you pay an agent by the hour and they spend part of that hour on calls that never close, or never even connect, that time is a real cost sitting outside the per-call price.

Fully loaded cost per call = (call spend + agent time cost for the period) / total calls handled

As a hypothetical example: say in a week you spent 500 dollars on calls, and paid an agent 20 dollars an hour for 25 hours handling those calls, which is 500 dollars in labor. Total cost is 1,000 dollars. If the agent handled 100 calls that week, fully loaded cost per call is 1,000 divided by 100, or 10 dollars, even if the billed price per call was lower on its own.

Follow-up time counts too

If your process includes callbacks, data entry, or a quoting step after the live call ends, that time belongs in the same calculation. A call that takes five minutes live and another fifteen minutes of follow-up work costs you the full twenty minutes of staffing time, not just the five.

Compare buffers with the full picture

A longer buffer usually costs more per billed call, since fewer calls reach it, but it also tends to filter out very short, low value connections before they ever reach an agent. Whether that trade is worth it for you depends on how much agent time a short, low value call would otherwise cost, which you only know once you have your own fully loaded number.

Track it the same way every period

Pick a period, weekly or monthly, and calculate spend, labor cost, and total calls handled the same way each time. A fully loaded cost per call that jumps around because the inputs are measured inconsistently will not tell you anything useful about whether a campaign is getting cheaper or more expensive to run.

The example above is a reminder that two weeks can land on the same fully loaded cost per call for different reasons: fewer calls handled with lower labor cost, or more calls handled with higher labor cost. Looking at the fully loaded number alone would treat both weeks as identical, when the underlying story, staffing efficiency in one case, call volume in the other, is worth understanding separately.

If you are deciding between two campaigns with similar billed prices, fully loaded cost per call is often the number that actually separates them, since one campaign might route more time to agents on calls that never cross the buffer, while another delivers fewer, more efficient calls at the same sticker price.

This is also a useful number to revisit whenever you change your buffer selection for a campaign. Moving to a longer buffer usually raises the billed price per call, but it can lower your fully loaded cost per call if it filters out enough short, unproductive connections that would otherwise have eaten agent time for nothing. You only know which effect wins for your desk by calculating the fully loaded number before and after the change.

Common questions