Cost per contact formula and what each channel costs

Call centres call it cost per call. Helpdesk vendors often say cost per ticket, a ticket being one customer request in their software. The short form causes trouble. CPC is cost per call to SQM Group’s guide to cost per call and cost per contact to Zendesk’s post on service goals.

Adding up a month of support costs

MetricNet, which benchmarks support centres, counts five kinds of cost in its column on cost per contact.

• salaries and benefits for the people who answer customers
• salaries and benefits for their managers, trainers and schedulers
• technology and telephone costs, from software licences to headsets
• office space, utilities and insurance
• travel, training and office supplies

The bottom of the fraction varies more. MetricNet divides by inbound contacts only. SQM Group, a call centre research firm, counts outbound calls as well, and HDI’s 2016 survey of support centres divides by tickets resolved. The number of contacts is your ticket volume for the month.

A software company pays its one support person $4,500 a month, taxes and benefits included, and spends $300 on its helpdesk and other tools. In March it handled 600 contacts, so its cost per contact was $8.00. But 150 were repeats. Those customers were writing again about a problem already raised, so the 450 problems cost $10.67 each.

Repeat contacts make the first figure look better. ContactBabel, an analyst firm, says customers who have to call several times bring cost per call down, which suits neither the business nor the customer. SQM’s answer is cost per resolution. In its 2021 study of more than 300 North American call centres, a call cost $8.60 and a resolved problem $12.04.

What a contact costs by channel

ContactBabel asks contact centre managers for their costs each year. These are the average costs per inbound contact from its 2024 guides, surveyed late in 2023.

Sources are ContactBabel’s US guide and ContactBabel’s UK guide. Only a minority of the 189 US respondents gave a cost per call. Most UK respondents skipped the social media question, and the guide asks for great care with that row. The US guide calls the gap between phone and digital channels “by no means dramatic”. ContactBabel’s page for its 2026 US guide puts an inbound call at $7.20.

Gartner, the analyst firm, has published two sets of figures. In a 2019 poll of service leaders, phone, chat and email together cost $8.01 per contact, and self-service about $0.10. Its 2024 benchmark note gives medians of $13.50 for assisted channels and $1.84 for self-service. The two sets do not match. Neither public page gives a sample for these figures or explains the change.

In the IT support centres of HDI’s 2016 survey, the median cost per ticket was $18.50. We read these figures and SQM’s on 19 September 2026.

Where three repeated figures come from

A cost of $7.16 per call appears on several pages. Voiso’s article credits it to ContactBabel, and Kustomer’s glossary lists it too. The ContactBabel pages we could read give $6.91 for 2023 and $7.20 for 2026. Its 2025 guide is behind a form.

MaestroQA’s guide to cost per call quotes $2.70 to $5.60 as the industry benchmark. The same range sits under 2025 in Kustomer’s glossary. It comes from a consultancy’s study of 18 large companies, each taking at least 900,000 calls a year. That page was already online in 2012. The same article estimates $6.00 to $8.00 or more for smaller companies.

Kustomer also says Gartner found that each contact moved to self-service saves about $11.66. That is Gartner’s two 2024 medians subtracted, $13.50 minus $1.84. Gartner’s public summary does not give the saving itself.

Short calls and self-service in the average

Contacts that cost little pull the average down. ContactBabel’s US guide says self-service calls, whose variable cost is negligible, are counted in the total and lower the average cost per call considerably. That is one way deflection moves the figure. Many short calls do the same, although they might be better handled by self-service.

Self-service leaves people the harder contacts. ContactBabel found emails getting longer and more complex for that reason. MetricNet says a cost above average is not always bad, and a low cost can come from cutting service. SQM says cost per call belongs to the call centre as a whole, never to an agent’s or a supervisor’s targets.

Prices for AI answers, per resolution and per outcome

AI helpdesks sell answers at a price per unit, from $0.50 to $1.50 among the four below. That is what you pay the vendor, and it leaves out your own team’s time.

Intercom’s unit has changed. In October 2025 its pricing page said $0.99 per resolution, and Intercom’s pricing page today says $0.99 per outcome, which includes some handovers.

Deacon charges a flat price by the month or the year, and each plan includes a monthly allowance of answers, counting every reply it writes.

Cost per ticket and cost per minute of handle time

Some helpdesk vendors divide by resolved tickets and still call the result cost per ticket, which makes it closer to cost per resolution. Zendesk’s guide to cost per resolution takes out abandoned conversations, duplicates and issues that come back.

MetricNet compares contact centres by cost per minute of handle time. Cost per contact is then the cost per minute times the average handle time.