Cost per contact formula and benchmarks by channel

To work it out, add up everything support cost in a month and divide it by the contacts you handled that month. If your one support hire costs $4,500 a month with taxes and benefits, your tools cost $300 and you handled 800 emails and chats, your cost per contact was $6.

Call centres call it cost per call, and helpdesks often say cost per ticket, because they file each request as a ticket. The short form, CPC, is easy to misread, since SQM Group uses it for cost per call and advertisers use it for cost per click. Every benchmark and price on this page was read on 23 September 2026.

If you answer support yourself, most of the cost is your own time, and the figure tells you what each question takes away from building. Deacon is an AI customer support agent that takes the repeat questions off your hands, answering from your own docs in seconds, and it has a free plan.

How to calculate cost per contact

The top of the fraction is everything it takes to answer customers. MetricNet, which benchmarks support centres, counts five kinds of cost in its column on cost per contact.

• Pay and benefits for the people who answer customers
• Pay and benefits for the people around them, from team leads and schedulers to trainers and managers
• Technology and telecoms, from software licences to headsets
• Office space, utilities and insurance
• Travel, training and office supplies

The bottom of the fraction is where studies part ways. MetricNet divides by inbound contacts only. SQM Group, a call centre research firm, counts outbound calls as well. HDI’s 2016 survey of support centres divides by tickets resolved, which makes its cost per ticket a cost per resolution. However you count them, the contacts are your ticket volume for the period.

When you’re the one answering, price your hours at what it would cost to hire someone for them. Say you spent 30 hours in March on 300 emails and chats. At $50 an hour that’s $1,500, and with $100 of tools each contact cost about $5.33. The hours are the part to watch, because they come out of your week.

Repeat contacts and cost per resolution

Repeat contacts make cost per contact look better than the service behind it. Say 60 of those 300 contacts were customers writing again about a problem they’d already raised. You solved 240 problems, at about $6.67 each. ContactBabel’s US guide makes the same point about phones. A customer who has to call several times brings the cost per call down, which is bad for the business and the customer alike.

Cost per resolution fixes that. In SQM Group’s 2021 study of more than 300 North American call centres, the average call cost $8.60, and it took 1.4 calls to resolve a problem, so each resolution cost $12.04.

Cheap contacts can mislead too. ContactBabel notes that self-service calls, which cost almost nothing, are counted in total call volumes and pull the average cost per call down considerably. Lots of short calls do the same, although the guide says they may be better off in self-service. MetricNet adds that a high cost per contact isn’t bad in itself if service and satisfaction are better than average, and a low one isn’t good if it was bought by cutting service. SQM says the figure belongs to the call centre as a whole, never to an agent’s or a supervisor’s targets.

What a contact costs, by channel

There’s no single standard figure, because each study counts costs and contacts its own way. These are the published figures we found with a named sample.

Only a minority of ContactBabel’s US respondents gave a cost per call, so treat those figures as a rough guide. In the US the gap between phones and the written channels is “by no means dramatic”, largely because few centres automate much. In the UK, where more web chats are automated, digital channels are becoming considerably cheaper. ContactBabel’s page for its 2026 guide puts a call at 47% more than an email and 23% more than a web chat.

The Postal Service figure is the simplest to follow. Its inspector general put an agent’s time at about $0.79 a minute, and a package tracking call took 7 minutes 27 seconds on average. In the 2020 financial year its phone menu kept nearly 12 million tracking calls from agents, which saved close to $69 million, while the 10 million or so it passed to agents cost nearly $58 million.

The Gartner figures, and where $2.70 to $5.60 comes from

Two sets of Gartner figures are widely quoted. In a 2019 poll of customer service leaders, phone, live chat and email cost $8.01 a contact on average, against about $0.10 for self-service such as a company’s website or app. Gartner’s February 2024 benchmarks give medians of $13.50 for assisted channels and $1.84 for self-service. Neither public page says how many companies were counted, and the two self-service figures are 18 times apart.

A range you’ll see on many pages is $2.70 to $5.60 a call, as in MaestroQA’s guide to cost per call. It comes from an article by F. Curtis Barry & Company, a consultancy, which looked at 18 large companies taking from 900,000 to more than 9 million calls a year. The article was online by July 2012, and it put smaller companies at $6.00 to $8.00 a call or more.

Another figure you’ll meet is $7.16. Voiso’s article gives it as ContactBabel’s latest, and links the guide’s page, which now shows $7.20 for 2026.

Cost per contact vs cost per resolution and price per resolution

These figures are easy to confuse, and each divides by something different.

Cost per minute of handle time explains why raw cost per contact can mislead. A centre whose contacts take 10 minutes and cost $10 is as efficient as one whose contacts take 5 minutes and cost $5, since both spend $1 a minute. Multiply the cost per minute by your average handle time and you’re back at cost per contact.

What AI support tools charge per resolution

Several AI helpdesks charge each time their bot resolves a conversation, so the bill rises with your volume. These are the prices on each vendor’s own pages.

That’s the charge for each resolution, on top of the plan or minimum each vendor sets. The conversations the bot doesn’t resolve still come to you, and your time on them is extra.

Bringing your cost per contact down with Deacon

For a founder, most of the cost of a contact is the time it takes to answer, and much of that time goes on the same questions. Deacon answers your customers in seconds, at any hour and in their own language, from your own docs. When your docs don’t cover a question, it says it doesn’t know instead of guessing and asks for the visitor’s email, so you can reply.

It needs you less as time goes on. A question your docs didn’t cover waits in Conversations with an Answer this button. Write the reply once and it joins what Deacon knows, so it can handle the next customer who asks the same thing. The more you answer, the less of your week the same questions take.

Its price doesn’t rise with each answer. The free plan gives 50 answers a month and needs no card. Starter gives 1,000 answers a month for $50, and Growth gives 4,000 answers a month for $150, or $40 and $120 a month billed yearly. A conversation takes about two answers, so Starter covers about 500 conversations a month. Nothing is billed past a plan’s answers, and no plan upgrades itself.

It also tells you why people get in touch. Topics gather similar questions into groups, show how many people asked each and give most groups a type, such as how-to, bug report or feature ask. When one missing answer or one confusing screen is behind a pile of contacts, you see it and can fix it at the source.

Deacon doesn’t report a cost per contact, because it can’t see your hours or your inbox. For your own figure, set Conversations to This month and its tag menu counts the month’s conversations. Add the emails you answered yourself, and divide the cost of your hours plus your plan’s price by the total. Chatbot analytics covers what else the dashboard counts, and you can try it all on the free plan.