Every fleet owner who calls us asks the same question within the first five minutes: what does it cost? The honest answer is that it depends on your call volume curve and the hours you need covered. But that is a frustrating non-answer, so here is the arithmetic properly laid out, including the numbers people forget.
The question behind the question
"What does it cost?" is almost never the real question. The real question is "will this save me money against what I am doing now?" — and you cannot answer that without first working out what your current desk actually costs. Most operators have never calculated it honestly, because the costs are scattered across payroll, premises and their own unpaid time.
The real cost of an in-house dispatch seat
Take a UK dispatcher. Whatever you pay them, that is not what they cost. The full picture includes:
- Gross salary — the number you think of first.
- Employer National Insurance — a meaningful percentage on top.
- Pension contributions — auto-enrolment minimums at least.
- Holiday cover — 28 days statutory. Someone covers those shifts, at overtime rates or with an extra head.
- Sickness and absence — unpredictable and always at the worst time.
- Recruitment — advertising, interviewing, and doing it again when they leave. Dispatcher churn is high.
- Training — weeks before a new dispatcher is genuinely productive, during which you are paying two people for one seat's output.
- Floor space, desk, headset, PC, phone line, heating, insurance.
- Your own management time — the rota, the disciplinaries, the 11pm call when someone does not turn up. Usually unpaid, usually yours.
- Night premiums — if you can recruit for nights at all, which is the hard part.
Add it up honestly and the loaded cost of a dispatcher seat is dramatically higher than the salary line. Then multiply: 24/7 coverage is not one person. Accounting for shifts, rest, holiday and absence, continuous cover needs roughly four and a half to five full-time equivalents per concurrent seat.
The moment most owners realise outsourcing is worth a look is when they work out that "one person on nights" is really four and a half salaries — and that they are personally the absence cover.
What an outsourced desk costs
We do not publish a per-seat rate, and we would be suspicious of anyone who does. A flat number either overcharges a quiet fleet or under-resources a busy one, and both outcomes end the relationship inside six months.
What we do instead: look at your last 30 days of call data, model the headcount your curve actually needs, and quote against that. Typically the all-in figure lands up to 70% below the loaded cost of equivalent in-house UK staffing — and that comparison is fair, because our price already includes recruitment, training, QA, management, floor space, power, connectivity and absence cover. There is no separate line for any of it.
The other structural difference is that you are buying covered hours, not employed people. When your Tuesday afternoon is quiet, you are not paying for four idle dispatchers.
What moves the number
- Hours covered. Overflow only is cheapest. Nights and weekends sit in the middle. Full 24/7 is the largest commitment and the biggest absolute saving.
- Call volume and its shape. A fleet with a violent Friday spike needs more float capacity than one with steady demand.
- Dedicated vs shared agents. Named agents who only work your account cost more and perform better. Most fleets over 40 vehicles choose dedicated.
- Scope. Voice only is one thing. Voice plus WhatsApp plus chat plus driver admin plus invoice processing is another.
- Platform. Marginal, but real. Agents get productive faster on Cabica and iCabbi than on older systems, which shortens onboarding.
Preferred platform
Why we point fleets at Cabica. It is a cloud taxi dispatch and booking platform, and being genuinely browser-based changes what an outsourced desk can do. Named agent accounts, precise permissions, instant revocation, no VPN into your office and no software to install on our floor. Fleets already running Cabica are consistently the quickest to go live with us.
The savings nobody puts in the spreadsheet
Cost per hour is the easy half. The revenue side is usually bigger and almost always ignored.
If you are dropping calls at peak — and most fleets running a thin desk are — every abandoned call is a fare that went to a competitor or an app. Fleets come to us reporting 30–40% of late-night calls unanswered. Recovering even part of that changes the P&L more than the staffing saving does.
Then the second-order effects: a rider who cannot get through once tries someone else next time, so you lose the lifetime value, not just the fare. Drivers who sit idle because the phone is not being answered get frustrated and drift to fleets that keep them busy. And there is the cost you will never invoice — the owner who has personally worked every Saturday night for three years.
When outsourcing does not pay
We would rather tell you this now than six weeks into an engagement:
- Very small fleets. Under about 10 vehicles, if the owner already answers the phone alongside other work, the marginal cost of that is close to zero. Outsourcing adds cost without removing a real burden.
- Walk-in and rank-counter operations. If a large share of your work comes from someone physically at a counter, no remote desk covers that.
- Very low volume with high complexity. A handful of daily bookings, each highly bespoke, is better handled by one person who knows every customer by name.
- No appetite for process. Outsourcing needs documented scripts and escalation rules. If the operation lives entirely in one person's head and nobody wants to write it down, it will not work.
If none of those describe you, the maths usually favours outsourcing — and starting on overflow cover lets you test it against your own numbers before committing to anything.
Ride Dispatchers Operations Team
We run outsourced taxi dispatch and contact-centre desks from Lahore for fleets across the UK, Ireland and North America. Everything here comes from work on live fleet accounts, not from a keyword tool.