Instrument

The Misheard Digit

What one wrong digit costs across a year of calls

The caller reads out an account number. One digit is heard wrong and the whole call is wasted.

A misheard digit does not degrade the answer, it ends the call - and the customer starts again with a person, which is worse than never having offered the automated route at all. This is the narrowest of the four instruments and the one with the cleanest number behind it.

This calculator needs JavaScript to run its arithmetic. Nothing is sent anywhere either way - if you would rather not enable it, the inputs below are exactly the questions a discovery call opens with, and you can send us the numbers instead.

What you have

Calls a month that require an ID or account number

Anything where the caller has to read a number aloud before the system can help them.

Share that fail on the spoken number, as a percentage

The measured baseline before the work was 84% first-pass capture, so 16% failing.

Cost of one repeat or handled-again call

Agent minutes plus the queue it adds for everybody behind it.

What it implies

Calls a year ended by a misheard number

How many of those the measured shift recovers

Annual cost of the failure mode: -
Annual value of closing it: -

The figure above, before and after the modelled change

The basis for this. First-pass capture of numbers spoken aloud went from 84% to 98.6% on a delivered production voice agent for a national telecom operator. This calculator applies that shift to your own volumes: your baseline may be better or worse, and the number to check first is your own first-pass rate, not the cost per call. One related figure worth knowing, because an average hides it: word error rate across Gulf dialects went from 31% to 12.7%, and the spread between the best and worst dialect narrowed from 19 points to 5. A system that works on average and badly on one region's speech has failed for a whole governorate.

They are estimating instruments, not measurements of your operation. Every one asks you for a number you are guessing at; the whole point of a two-week diagnostic is that it counts those instead of asking.

Send us your numbers The service line behind it

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Start here

A calculator estimates. A diagnostic counts.

Send us what you put into any of these four and we will tell you which of the numbers is worth measuring properly first.

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