Five months of a VA appointment desk, $28k in, and turnover ate it
I run rehabs and I wanted a steady flow of seller appointments without me on the phone. Set up an appointment setting desk through an agency in November: two dialers at $11/hr fully loaded, plus a $1,900 setup fee, plus dialer and data at about $640/mo on my card. Call it $28,400 across five months.
Month two was actually good. 62 conversations a day across the two seats, 14 appointments in the month, cost per appointment around $84 counting everything. I signed two contracts off that, one closed, and I thought I'd found the machine.
Then the first dialer left. The agency replaced him inside their 10 business day guarantee, which sounds great until you read what the guarantee covers. It covers placement. It doesn't cover ramp. New person needed roughly three weeks to get back to the old contact rate, and I paid full rate for those three weeks. Then in month four the second one left too, and I got a replacement who was clearly a week out of training. By month five my cost per appointment was $190 and my appointment-to-contract rate had dropped because the calls were worse, which I only learned when I finally listened to recordings.
That's the part I'm annoyed about. I wasn't listening to calls for the first three months. I was reading a dashboard the agency built, and the dashboard counted dials.
What I'd do differently. Buy a three seat pod instead of two so one departure is a 33% hit instead of 50%. Ask in writing what the average tenure of their dialers is on real estate accounts, and treat anything under seven months as the number that sets my cost, because it does. And pull five recordings a week myself from day one, not month four.