Introduction

Just about every Zendesk administrator out there will have heard of Zendesk’s new package of tools, Advanced AI. Whilst its existence is easy to learn about, gaining a solid grasp on whether the tools, which require an extra subscription, are actually worthwhile is much harder.

With CS departments’ budgets coming under more pressure than ever before, it’s pertinent to complete a cost/benefit analysis of these supposedly groundbreaking tools, so let’s get right to it.

Cost of an Agent (Include Everything)

It should go without saying that any new tool is only really going to be worthwhile if it saves your agents time, and thus saves you money. So, to begin with, we need to make sure we understand the true cost of our brilliant agents.

The average customer service salary in the UK as of 2024 is around £24,000. In the US, the figure is $33,000, which is almost exactly the same once converted - meaning we can use either number for our calculations.

Whilst additional costs vary from country to country, most employers face similar types of considerations.

On top of that $33,000, we need to consider any taxes due by the employer (14% in the UK), pension contributions (that’s another 5%), plus further considerations like desk space (let’s take a low estimate of $300/month). Of course, if your team is fully remote, your physical costs might be lower.

So let’s calculate the true annual cost of our typical US customer service agent now:

Base salary: $33,000

Pension contribution: $1,650 (5% of salary)

National Insurance (or equivalent employer’s tax): $4,620 (14% of salary)

Desk space: $3,600 ($300/month)

There is another cost which I suggest we should also add, if we have any belief that Advanced AI will truly reduce our teams’ workload, and that is the cost of each agent’s Zendesk licence.

Why so? If your CS team has 40 agents and Advanced AI is able to help you reduce your workforce to 38 agents, then you need two fewer Zendesk licences. At $1,800/year for Zendesk Enterprise, this cost shouldn’t be ignored.

Zendesk licence: $1,800/year

Total cost per agent per year: $44,670 - or $45,000 if we round up (bear in mind we haven’t factored in hiring and training costs, cost of managers to run the team and so on).

Now let’s convert that number to an hourly rate, so we can more easily assess the numbers when it comes to agent productivity. There are 52 weeks in a year, but only roughly 48 are worked, and 40 hours in a typical work week, meaning the average hourly cost to an employer of a US or UK customer service agent is $23.27

Now we’ve crunched those numbers, we can move on to the next part of our calculation.

Cost of advanced AI

Much to many people’s disappointment, Advanced AI requires an extra subscription, even if you’re on Zendesk’s most expensive Enterprise plan.

It costs $50 per month per agent, meaning that if you have 100 agents in your team, it’ll cost you an extra $5,000 per month. But for the sake of simplicity, let’s keep the numbers focussed on a single agent.

We know that the tool costs us $600/year for each agent. Divided by 48 work weeks in the year and 40 work hours per week, Advanced AI costs $0.31 - yes, just 31 cents per hour.

Savings target

So, Advanced AI is going to cost you 31 cents per hour, per agent. The real question is, does that save you money overall? We’ve already ascertained that an average agent costs $23.27/hour. The question is, does Advanced AI save us more than the 31 cents it costs us each hour?

To do so, it would need to save your average agent just under a minute of work every hour. The maths is simple: at $23.27/hour, an average agent costs employers 39 cents per minute, close enough to the hourly cost of Advance AI at 31 cents.

Advanced AI increases the cost of your agent by $0.31 per hour. $0.31 is just under a minute of your agent’s time. So we can deduce that if Advanced AI is allowing your agent to complete 60 minutes’ work in 59 minutes or less, your quids in, as we say here in the UK!

The next step is to ascertain whether Advanced AI really will save your agents at least one minute per hour.

To do that we need to know how much time is taken up by the different tasks that agents complete with Zendesk.

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Typical Time Taken Per Task

Let’s use an example scenario of a first line support team at a contact center. We’ll use the same example numbers for all our comparisons.

Although CS managers often assign some agents to focus on only tickets, others to focus on only live chats, and others still to focus only on calls, given that Advanced AI has to be purchased for all active agents, we’ll need to look at all agents as an average in order to run the numbers properly.

Let’s assume that our hypothetical average agent handles:

• 5 calls per hour, at 4 minutes per call (20 minutes)
  
• 7 tickets per hour, at 3 minutes per ticket (21 minutes)
  
• 5 live chats per hour, at 3 minutes per live chat (15 minutes)

That just about fills an hour, with a few minutes spare as we’re all human!

With all the numbers on the agent side calculated, we’re ready to see what can be done on the Advanced AI side. In Part 2, we’ll look at Advanced AI’s various features and crunch the numbers to see if that extra cost of Advanced AI can pay for itself.

Bear in mind that even if you ultimately decide not to purchase the Advanced AI add-on, having a per hour or per minute understanding of your agent costs, like we gained above, is extremely useful.

It helps you assess new SOPs or other time-saving features and weigh them up fairly.

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