Owentra
Before you pay for a chatbot, it's fair to ask whether it earns its keep. The good news is that you can estimate the return in about five minutes using numbers you already have — and being a little conservative keeps you honest.
The formula, step by step
Work top-down from your monthly traffic:
- Chats started = monthly visitors × engagement rate (realistically 2–8% open the chat).
- AI-resolved chats = chats started × deflection rate (the share the AI handles alone — a sensible planning range is 60–80%).
- Hours saved = AI-resolved chats × average minutes per chat ÷ 60.
- Cost saved = hours saved × your fully-loaded agent cost per hour (salary + overhead, not just base pay).
A worked example
Say you get 40,000 visitors a month. At a 5% engagement rate that's 2,000 chats. At a 70% deflection rate the AI fully handles 1,400 of them. If each would have taken an agent 6 minutes, that's 140 hours saved a month. At a fully-loaded cost of $25/hour, that's $3,500 a month — roughly $42,000 a year — against a tool that often costs tens of dollars a month. Even if you halve every assumption to be safe, the maths still works comfortably.
Don't forget the revenue side
Deflection is only half the story. The conversations a static contact form would have lost — the late-night shopper, the "just checking" prospect — become verified leads when the bot captures and confirms them. For many businesses that captured-pipeline number dwarfs the support savings, so include it.
Be honest about the costs
A fair ROI estimate also counts the setup time to write good knowledge content, and the small ongoing effort of reviewing transcripts. These are real but modest, and they're front-loaded — the savings compound every month after.
Run your own numbers
Rather than build a spreadsheet, plug your figures into the free chatbot ROI & support-savings calculator — it shows conversations handled, hours and cost saved per month and year, and verified leads captured. To understand where deflection comes from, read how to reduce support tickets, and see what a setup costs on the pricing page.
