What each voicemail costs you per month
Between 10% and 20% of the calls your agents answer are voicemail. Each one costs about 18 seconds. Here is the full math, with numbers you can swap for your own.
In short
- A voicemail eats ~18 seconds of the agent before they hang up.
- With 30 agents that is 115 hours a month lost.
- Equivalent to 3.4 full-time agents talking to machines.
- Automatic detection recovers that time for less than one agent costs.
The 18 seconds
When an agent gets a voicemail, they do not hang up right away. They greet, wait for a reply, listen to the recorded message, realize it is a machine and only then cut. In real operations that cycle takes between 15 and 20 seconds.
The math
Take a mid-sized operation:
30-agent operation
Nearly 40 hours a month of the whole operation talking to answering machines. If your voicemail rate is closer to 20% — common in older lists or with poor data quality — the figure climbs past 50 hours.
Translated into cost
At the cost of an agent, those 40 hours are a quarter of a monthly salary paid for talking to nobody. But the real cost is higher, because that time was not just lost: it was time not spent making contact.
Why Asterisk AMD does not solve it
Asterisk ships AMD(), which decides by looking at the rhythm of the
audio: how long the greeting lasts and how many silences there are. It works on
the average case and fails at the edges:
- A voicemail starting with "Hello..." passes as a person.
- A person who answers quietly gets cut as voicemail.
The second error is the expensive one: you do not lose time, you lose the contact. And in the report it shows up as voicemail, so nobody finds out.
It analyzes the timbre of the audio instead of its rhythm. A recording went through a codec before arriving and that leaves a fingerprint that cannot be faked. It answers in under 2 seconds, works with Asterisk and Vicidial without touching the dialplan, and is billed per analyzed call.
See how it works →How to measure your real number
You do not need to buy anything to know what you are losing. With your CDR:
- Filter one month of answered calls.
- Count those that lasted under 25 seconds and were dispositioned as no contact.
- Multiply by the average duration of that group.
That number, in hours, is what your operation gives away to answering machines every month.
Frequently asked questions
What percentage of answered calls are voicemail?
Between 10% and 20% in average-quality lists. In older lists or with outdated data it can exceed 25%.
How much time does an agent lose on each voicemail?
Between 15 and 20 seconds: they greet, wait, listen to the recorded message and only then hang up. It is not instant because the agent needs a few seconds to realize.
Does voicemail detection pay for itself?
In operations above 20 agents, usually yes. The cost per analyzed call is a fraction of the agent time it recovers.
Want to measure your real case?
We help you get the exact number for your operation, using your own data.
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