What is your failure demand costing you?
Four numbers you already know, and a conservative estimate of what avoidable contacts cost you a year. Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is sent anywhere, and there is nothing to sign up for.
All channels — voice, chat, email, messaging.
Include after-call work. Most organisations forget this and understate the total.
Salary plus employer costs, management overhead, technology and facilities — not base salary. If you only know salary, roughly double it.
The one number you probably don’t know. See the note below on how to get a defensible figure — and why we haven’t pre-filled an industry average.
Estimated annual cost of avoidable contacts
€0
Conservative. Direct handling cost only.
Headcount equivalent assumes roughly 140 productive contact-handling hours per agent per month. Everything here is direct handling cost — it excludes complaints, goodwill payments, churn, and the value demand those agents weren’t serving.
About that percentage
We haven’t pre-filled an industry average, and we’re not going to. Published failure demand figures vary enormously — by sector, by how the study defined the term, and by who was paying for the study. Dropping a confident-looking number into your business case is the fastest way to have the whole thing dismissed in the first meeting.
Three ways to get a figure you can defend, in ascending order of how much weight it will carry:
- Ask your team. Ask five experienced agents what proportion of their contacts wouldn’t exist if everything upstream had worked. They will converge fast, and they are rarely far off. Good enough to decide whether this is worth investigating.
- Sample and code. Take 200 contacts at random from last month, read them, and classify each against the taxonomy. Half a day’s work. Defensible in a room, and usually the moment the argument stops being theoretical.
- Classify the whole stream. Every contact, every period, with named causes and a cost against each. That’s AURA Source, and there’s a free tier.
Use the low end. If your sample says 40%, build the case on 30%. A number nobody can attack is worth more than a bigger number that spends the meeting being argued with.
The same logic applies to everything on this page. The estimate is deliberately conservative — and it is usually still large enough that the conversation changes.
What this number is for
It isn’t a target and it isn’t a forecast. It’s an opening figure for a conversation with someone outside the contact centre — the point being that the cost is large, it lands entirely on your budget, and almost none of the causes are yours to fix.
The number that actually moves an organisation is one step further on: this specific defect, owned by this specific team, costs this much a year. A total gets attention. A ranked list of named causes gets action. That’s the difference between this calculator and a Defect Ledger.