Should you hire a dispatcher or an office coordinator?

Both halves of this decision are systematically mis-stated, and in opposite directions. The cost is understated because the figure in the owner's head is a wage. The benefit is understated because it consists of calls that rang out, and a call that rings out leaves nothing behind. The result is a decision that feels careful and is built from two wrong numbers.

Take the cost first, because it is the one that can be fixed exactly. An employee costs the wage plus a statutory floor that applies before any benefit, any equipment or any software is considered. The employer's share of Social Security runs at a fixed rate up to a wage base that stops; Medicare runs at a lower rate on all covered wages with no ceiling at all; federal unemployment applies at a small rate on a low per-employee base, and state unemployment sits on top of that at a rate specific to the employer's own experience. None of this is negotiable and all of it is arithmetic, so there is no reason to carry a wage figure into the decision when the loaded figure is available.

The revenue side cannot be made exact, but it can be made real. The relevant number is how many inbound calls are currently answered by a person, measured across the working day rather than in aggregate, because the loss in a small firm is almost never uniform. It clusters where the existing coordinator is already on a call: the first hour, the lunch band, and whatever time of day the trade's work generates the most inbound. That measurement is available from outside the business, which matters because it does not depend on a phone system that only records answered calls.

The comparison that then becomes possible is a specific one rather than a feeling. Take the calls that are currently going unanswered in the bands the measurement identifies, apply your actual close rate on answered enquiries and your actual average ticket, and hold the result against the loaded annual cost. Contractors who run this usually find the answer is not close in either direction — which is the useful outcome, because the decision has been sitting open on the assumption that it was.

There is a structural alternative the framing usually excludes. The reason the coordinator is needed is that calls arrive while the existing one is occupied, and that is a concurrency problem rather than a volume problem. An always-on first response that acknowledges the caller, captures the details and holds the conversation open addresses concurrency directly and costs a fraction of a salary. It does not replace a coordinator for the work that needs judgement — dispatch, scheduling around a technician who is running late, an unhappy customer — and it removes the failure that was driving the hire.

The honest sequencing is therefore: measure the loss by band, price the hire loaded rather than as a wage, and check whether the specific failure is concurrency or capacity. A concurrency failure answered with a salary is an expensive way to solve a cheap problem, and a capacity failure answered with software is a cheap way to fail to solve an expensive one.