Cost per Contact

Cost per contact divides total support cost — salaries, benefits, tooling, overhead, management — by the number of contacts handled. It is the honest unit economics of a support operation and the anchor for most build-vs-buy and automation ROI cases.

The formula is total operating cost over total contacts in the same period.

What it hides: the number is only as complete as the costs you load into it. Leaving out tooling, QA, management, or the expensive escalated cases makes support look cheaper than it is. And cost per contact says nothing about whether the contact should have existed — a low per-contact cost on a flood of preventable tickets is still expensive in total.