Calculate minutes needed for auto dialer campaign

We are looking at a campaign that leaves messages and offers customers a chance to respond.  If we would place calls on perhaps 3000 per day with a 35 second message, and have an average of 10 responses, what would you estimate the cost in phone minutes to be?  Secondly, any idea how many lines would need to be dedicated to do this?

First, estimate the total minutes

Phone services measure call time from the time a call is answered, either by a human or a machine, till the time it is disconnected. So for live answer, the estimated time is about 40 seconds for a 35 second message. For machine answer, assuming 15 second machine prompt, then the estimated time will be 60 seconds. You can normally ignore the 10 responses when estimating since it is a tiny fraction of all the calls.

A 40 second call will be billed around 0.7 minute per call. (please see pricing FAQ online about our 30/6 billing method). The actual time is usually shorter since people may not listen to the whole message. Machine answer will be billed around 1 minute per call.

Estimate the % of live answer

Assuming 50% calls goes to machine. You can easily get the total minutes needed for 3000 calls.

1500 x 0.7 + 1500 x 1 = 2550 (minutes or credit)

Estimate Lines

The time needed to finish the 3000 calls will be longer than 2550 minutes since you must include the ring time. Assuming 20 second for that, you need to add 1000 minute (20 / 60 x 3000) to the total call time. That’s 3550 minutes.

If you run the campaign 8 hours per day. Then each line uses 480 minutes. So the total line needed will be 8 Lines (3550 / 480 = 7.3)