Cost per contact calculator
Cost per contact is total cost divided by contacts, which is true and useless. Built bottom-up it becomes a lever diagram: an agent's fully loaded cost, the share of paid time that reaches the queue, how busy they are while there, and how long each contact takes. Enter those and the calculator gives the cost per contact and the contacts one agent handles in a year.
£, fully loaded.
- Fully loaded cost per agent
- £43,680
- Contacts per agent per year
- 13,923
- Handling hours per agent per year
- 1,160.3 h
- Cost per paid hour
- 22.4
- Cost per handling hour
- 37.6
£
£, what a minute on the phone really costs.
Show the working
- Fully loaded cost = £26000 × (1 + 20%) × (1 + 40%) = £43680 a year, or £22.40 per paid hour.
- Handling hours a year = 37.5 × 52 × (1 − 30%) × 85% = 1160 h.
- Contacts a year = 1160 × 3,600 ÷ 300 = 13923.
- Cost per contact = £43680 ÷ 13923 = £3.14.
Doing this for every interval of the week? Pebble WFM computes the requirement from your forecast and builds the roster. Free month, no card needed.
How cost per contact is calculated
Start with what an agent costs: salary, employer on-costs, and the overheads that exist because the agent does (a seat, a licence, a share of a team leader). Then count how many contacts that money buys: contracted hours less shrinkage gives time at the queue, occupancy gives time handling, and handle time turns hours into contacts.
The levers are visible in the chain. Five points of shrinkage or occupancy move the cost by about seven per cent; ten per cent off handle time moves it by ten. Salary is the lever everyone reaches for and the one with the least room.
The figure is a planning average. Cost per contact by channel, by contact type or by hour of day is where decisions get made, and a self-service or deflection case should always be argued in cost per contained contact, not per deflected one.
Frequently asked questions
- What is a typical cost per call?
- Industry surveys put voice between £3 and £6 per call in the UK, with wide variation by handle time and complexity. Chat runs lower per session and email lower still per message, though not always per resolved issue.
- Should I include overheads?
- For comparing channels or making an outsourcing decision, yes: the fully loaded figure is what you would stop paying. For managing the operation week to week, the direct cost is more useful because overheads do not move with the roster.
- Why does cost per contact rise when volume falls?
- Because the loaded cost is fixed over the short term and the contacts it is spread across shrink. Occupancy drops, and every contact carries more idle time. It is the same arithmetic as the pooling benefit, seen from finance.
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