Your CFO asks one question about AI on the front desk: what will it cost us across all our locations?
The software price is the easy half. You can read it off a pricing page. The harder half is the number you already pay and never see on an invoice: the hours your front desk spends chasing leads.
You need both numbers to make the call. This post gives you a way to get them.
Three ways franchises cover the front desk
Front desk staff. Your team answers calls, texts back web leads and follows up between check-ins. You pay for this in hours, and lead follow-up competes with every other task at the desk.
A virtual receptionist or answering service. A person answers calls for you, for example after hours. Services price by the minute or by the call. The service takes messages. Your team still has to call the lead back and book the visit.
AI agents. The agents answer web forms, texts and missed calls, follow up, and book into your CRM. AI Front Desk prices per location, per month:
- Starter, $299: the lead booking agent
- Growth, $399: adds lead nurturing and missed-sale follow-up
- Operations, $699: the full agent set, the voice channel, a multi-location dashboard and a dedicated success manager
Volume discounts start at 2 locations, and brands with 10 or more get enterprise pricing. You can pay month to month or annually.
The cost you are paying now
In August we counted every message our agents sent across 218 locations and timed what the same work takes a person. One message takes at least 3 minutes: open the CRM, read the thread, pick a reply, write it and log it. We counted nothing above that minimum, so the hours below run low.
That work came to:
- 33.6 staff hours per location, per month
- 403 staff hours per location, per year
- 4.6 staff hours behind every booking
Now put your own fully loaded desk rate against those numbers. You know that rate without looking it up.
Run the math for one location
Say your fully loaded desk rate is $20 an hour. Use your own number in place of ours.
- 33.6 hours × $20 = $672 a month in follow-up labor per location
- 403 hours × $20 = $8,060 a year per location
- 4.6 hours × $20 = $92 of desk time behind each booking, before you spend a dollar on ads
Multiply the monthly number by your location count. At 50 locations, 33.6 hours each is 1,680 desk hours a month.
One caution keeps this math honest. If your desk does little follow-up today, you are not paying those hours now, and your savings on labor will be smaller. In that case your case rests on the bookings you are losing, which is the next section.
The revenue side
Labor is the cost you can measure. Lost bookings are harder to see, because a lead who booked somewhere else leaves no trace in your CRM.
One boutique fitness studio we work with had a speed to lead of over 13 hours before it went live. It reached fewer than 12% of its leads inside the first hour. After it went live, speed to lead dropped to 8 minutes. From the same flow of leads, it booked 44% more intro visits and sold 37% more memberships.
Take one location's monthly bookings and add 10%. Multiply those extra bookings by what a new member is worth to you, then by your location count. Put that number next to the labor math.
Questions to ask any vendor about price
Before you sign, get a written answer to each of these.
- Is the price per location, per conversation or per message? Per-message pricing grows with your follow-up, which is the work you want more of.
- Are there setup, training or integration fees? Ask for every one-time fee in writing.
- Does the agent work inside your current CRM and booking system? If staff need a new tool, add the training time to the cost.
- What is the contract term? Ask whether you can start with a few locations before you commit the system.
- Who sees the results by location? You need a dashboard that shows reply time and bookings for each location, or you cannot prove the spend at the next budget review.
Book a free assessment
In one call, we review the booking and CRM systems your locations run on, how your locations handle leads today, and what a rollout would look like, including the return you can expect.