What 24/7 dispatch actually costs to run in-house

Plenty of contractors have thought about bringing dispatch fully in-house. Own the customer experience, no vendor, no scripts written by strangers.

It is a reasonable instinct. It is also, at 24/7, considerably more expensive than most people estimate — because the arithmetic is not about salaries, it is about coverage math.

The number nobody runs first

A week has 168 hours. A full-time employee works 40. So round-the-clock coverage needs 4.2 FTEs before you account for anything real.

Then account for the real things. Holidays, sick days, training, turnover and the simple fact that one person cannot be the only one who knows how to do a job. Most operations planners use a shrinkage factor of 1.3 to 1.4 for continuous coverage, which puts you at five to six people to genuinely never leave the phone unattended.

At a loaded cost of roughly $2,800 to $3,500 a month per CSR:

Five people × $3,000 = $15,000 a month, or about $180,000 a year, to answer the phone. Before you have paid a technician to do any of the work.

And that still gets you one call at a time per person on shift. At 3am there is one CSR. If two calls arrive, one waits.

Why the overnight shift is the worst money in the business

Split the week by value and the problem becomes obvious.

Window	Hours/week	Share of call volume	Coverage cost
Weekday 8am–6pm	50	Most of it	Justified
Weekday 6pm–10pm	20	High-value emergencies	Justified
Saturday daytime	10	Meaningful, high intent	Usually justified
Overnight + Sunday	88	Small	Very hard to justify

More than half the hours in a week generate a small fraction of the calls. You are paying full wages, and often a night differential, for the quietest hours in the business.

This is why hiring a night CSR is the most common expensive mistake in this category. The instinct is right — those calls are worth catching — but the structure is wrong.

The three structures that work better

1. Daytime staff, automated overflow and after-hours. Hire for the hours where judgement pays: complex calls, replacement quotes, upset customers, repeat relationships. Put something that never sleeps behind them for overflow, evenings, weekends and peak surges. Roughly $3,000 for the person plus a few hundred for the coverage, with no ceiling on simultaneous calls.

2. Daytime staff plus an on-call tech rotation for genuine emergencies only. Works if your overnight volume is genuinely tiny and your techs accept the rotation. The failure mode is that the tech is asleep, or driving, or already on a job — and answering from a truck at 1am is not a good customer experience for anyone. It also burns out your best people, which is expensive in a market where labour shortages are the defining constraint.

3. Shared coverage with another contractor. Rare, but two non-competing shops in adjacent territories splitting an overnight CSR does work. Complicated to administer, and it falls apart the first time both are busy at once.

The honest comparison

For a shop with three to eight trucks, the realistic options look like this:

Approach	Monthly	Simultaneous calls	Gaps
Full in-house 24/7	~$15,000	1 per shift	Sick days, turnover
Daytime CSR only	~$3,000	1	128 hrs/week uncovered
Daytime CSR + answering service	~$3,400	Limited in their peak	Messages, not bookings
Daytime CSR + automation	~$3,400	Unlimited	Nuance, complex calls

The last two cost roughly the same. The difference is what happens at the end of the call — a message you have to action, or a job already on the schedule. That distinction is the whole comparison.

When in-house genuinely is right

We are not going to pretend automation wins every case.

Build it in-house if most of your revenue is commercial contracts with named account managers and service-level agreements. Those customers expect a person who knows their buildings, and the contract value supports the headcount.

Build it in-house if your average ticket is very high — a shop doing mostly $12,000-plus replacements can justify a person on every call, because the conversion difference between a great CSR and an adequate one is worth thousands per job.

And keep a person on daytime regardless. The argument here is not against hiring. It is against paying full-time wages for 3am.

The calculation to run tonight

Take your after-hours call count for last month. Multiply by your close rate and your average emergency ticket. That is the revenue those hours are worth.

Then divide $15,000 into it. If round-the-clock in-house coverage pays for itself, hire — you have a bigger business than this article assumes and you should staff it properly.

For most three-to-eight truck shops it does not, by a wide margin. Which means the useful question is not how do I cover 168 hours, but what is the cheapest reliable thing that covers the 118 hours my people do not.

Ours is $397 a month and you can hear it before deciding anything: (260) 264-9632.

Related reading: Hire a CSR, buy a service, or automate? · The after-hours playbook · What a missed call actually costs

• staffing
• unit economics
• dispatch