What a call-taker seat costs a copier dealer, and how to work it out

Hourly wage is only one part of what a call-taker seat costs. Benefits, hiring and training may add to it. A fuller estimate may also include all of them, along with the wage.

Below is a method you can run with your own numbers. Where we use a public figure, we fetched it and say where it comes from.

The wage

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes wage data for dispatchers, except police, fire and ambulance. The O*NET page that carries BLS’s 2025 wage data states that workers nationwide on average earn $24.20 per hour. The same page gives the 10th percentile as $17.32 and the 90th as $37.57. We use this occupation as a public proxy for a dispatch and call-intake seat. Compare your actual rate with those percentile figures.

Benefits

BLS’s Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release, for June 2026, says wages and salaries made up 70.0 percent of employer costs for private industry workers, and benefit costs made up the remaining 30.0 percent. That share covers all private industry workers, and it doesn’t isolate dispatchers. Swap in your own benefit costs if you have them. Converting the benefit share to an hourly amount makes it easier to include in the calculation.

Using that BLS private-industry share as a benchmark, divide the wage by 0.700 to estimate wages plus benefits. Applied to the $24.20 national average, that gives about $34.57 an hour. If you use that benchmark, $34.57 is the estimated hourly rate to apply to paid hours in your own calculation.

The cost of hiring

SHRM’s 2025 benchmarking survey, run between Jan. 9 and March 3, 2025, reports an average cost per hire of $5,475 for nonexecutive roles. Multiply the number of seats you refill in a year by your own cost per hire to get a yearly hiring cost.

Check whether your calculation includes items such as advertising, agency fees and managers’ interviewing time. Write each item next to its dollar figure, so you can see which costs are in your number and which are missing from it. Your books may count these differently from the survey, and that’s fine as long as you’re consistent.

Training time

Use your own records to estimate how long a new call taker needs before taking calls alone with contracts, meter history and dispatch. Write down the hours a trainer or a senior person spends with a new hire before that person takes calls alone. Multiply those hours by the trainer’s own wage-plus-benefits cost per hour.

Putting the parts together

1. Wage per hour, then total cost per hour, from the benefits section.
2. Paid hours in a year for one seat, times that total cost. This is the seat’s running cost.
3. Seat refills per year, times your cost per hire from the hiring section.
4. Training hours per new hire, times the trainer’s cost per hour, times seat refills per year.
5. Add the three lines. The result is a yearly cost for one seat, before phones, software and supervision. Keep every line in dollars so the three can be added directly.

What the method leaves out

The calculation covers only the cost categories listed here. Fill in the blanks. It doesn’t count the calls a seat misses while it’s empty, the overtime other staff work to cover it, or the service calls that wait while a replacement learns the accounts.

Where automation fits

Once you have estimated the seat’s cost, identify which calls still require a person. Meter reads, toner orders and service call intake are the kinds of contacts Auralis handles around the clock, and it records them in e-automate. Dealers can then decide how they want staff to handle the calls that require judgment. Fill in the blanks first, though, because a guessed number carries more weight than it deserves once it sits in a spreadsheet next to real ones. Run the steps above first, so the comparison rests on your own figures.

If you are weighing a second seat against an AI agent, download Build vs buy: how to add AI agents to your team for a side-by-side of time, cost and the people each path needs.

Sources

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, National Wages via O*NET OnLine, Dispatchers, Except Police, Fire, and Ambulance (43-5032.00), 2025 wage data.
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026 reference period.
• Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), SHRM releases 2025 benchmarking reports, survey run Jan. 9 to March 3, 2025.
• Auralis conversations with dealers (internal).