Chatbot ROI: how to calculate what conversational AI saves you

What chatbot ROI actually measures

The ROI of an AI chatbot, or of conversational AI more broadly, compares two monthly numbers: what answering customer questions costs your team today, and what it costs once an assistant answers most of them. Divide the difference by what the assistant costs and you have the return.

Two inputs decide almost everything: how many conversations you get, and what one conversation costs in staff time. Channels, answer quality and tooling only matter because they move those two. That is also why vendor claims of a fixed "300% ROI" say little about your situation.

The formula

Cost per conversation = hourly cost of an agent × average handling time. Monthly saving = conversations a month × cost per conversation, minus the price of your plan. ROI = monthly saving ÷ plan price × 100%.

In our ROI calculator we use €18.28 an hour including employer costs and 4 minutes per question, which comes to €1.22 per conversation. Replace those with your own figures if you know them: a specialist team costs more per answer, a quick FAQ less.

A worked example with real prices

Say you get 200 customer questions a week, about 866 a month. At €1.22 each that is €1,055 a month in staff time. The Heyloha 1,000 plan costs €339 a month, so the saving is €716 a month, or 68%.

That figure assumes the assistant handles everything. In practice your team keeps roughly one in five conversations: complaints, exceptions and questions that need a person. Allow for that and the saving is closer to €505 a month. That is the number to plan with.

Where the break-even point is

The smallest plan costs €149 a month. At €1.22 per conversation it pays for itself from about 122 conversations a month, roughly 28 a week. Below that volume the return is mostly availability outside office hours, not cost.

Above it, the saving grows with volume, because the plan price rises much more slowly than the staff time it replaces. See the pricing page for what each plan includes.

Conversational AI cost savings beyond chat

Conversational AI is not only website chat. Phone, WhatsApp and email can be answered from the same knowledge base, on the same plan, so each extra channel adds saving without adding a hire.

The channels differ in what not answering costs you. An unanswered chat is a slow reply; an unanswered call is often a customer who rings the next company. That is why teams with a busy phone line tend to feel the effect first, and why the AI phone assistant is often where they start.

What real customers measured

Mojo Concerts used an AI assistant around the De Grote Schijn festival and saved 32 hours of work, with 70% fewer repeat questions. Van der Linden Makelaardij handles around 675 conversations a month across five branches and saves about 56 hours a month. Both are in our customer stories.

Notice what those numbers have in common: they come from volume. Neither team replaced people; they stopped spending hours on questions that already had an answer.

What most ROI calculations leave out

On the cost side: the time to set up the assistant and keep its knowledge current. With Heyloha a website chat is live in about 30 minutes and a phone line within an hour, but someone should still review answers in the first weeks.

On the benefit side: revenue from conversations you now miss out of hours or during busy spells. It is often larger than the cost saving, but it varies so much per business that an honest calculation leaves it out and treats it as upside.

Calculate your own ROI

Enter your own number of questions in the chatbot ROI calculator and you see the monthly saving, the matching plan and the break-even point in seconds. Want to test it on your own website first? Try Heyloha free for 14 days.

Frequently asked questions