Executive summary
It’s never easy to measure the cost of a software support ticket, because it costs more than the time a support agent spends writing a reply.
The cost also includes team leaders, training, ticketing software, telephony, office costs and the time spent on follow-up messages. The cost increases if a ticket needs to be answered by a developer.
For an early budget or business case, use £6 to £15 per routine human-assisted software support ticket.
Use your own operating costs for serious planning. Published figures vary, because researchers measure different things.
Separate routine tickets from engineering work, and count repeat contacts rather than treating every channel interaction as a resolved problem.
Then use the ticket data to choose documentation work. A repeated question that costs £50,000 a year deserves more attention than an article whose only argument is that the help centre feels incomplete.
Published benchmarks range from £6 to about £14
MetricNet
MetricNet’s 2021 North American service-desk data reported these average costs per ticket [1]:
| Channel | Average cost per ticket |
| Voice | $17.19 |
| $16.13 | |
| Chat | $15.72 |
This equates to around £12 to £14.
They describe an IT service-desk setting, so they are a reasonable reference point for technical software support.
ContactBabel
ContactBabel’s December 2025 self-service research gives a lower figure for phone calls [2]:
- £6.25 per interaction (in the UK)
- $7.16 per interaction (in the US)
We should bear in mind that a phone interaction is not always a resolved ticket. A customer might call twice. They might send logs by email, and then wait for a specialist to investigate.
A working estimate
A sensible working estimate is probably:
- £6 to £15 for a routine assisted ticket
- Around 10p for a successful self-service interaction (according to ContactBabel)
- More if the case reaches engineering
If you use those figures for an initial business case, you should replace them with your own data as soon as you have it.
How to calculate your own cost per ticket
The basic calculation is:
Cost per ticket = total support operating costs ÷ tickets resolved
Include the full cost of running the support operation:
- Salaries, pensions and employer taxes
- Team leaders, managers, trainers and quality staff
- Ticketing, chat and telephone systems
- Contractors and outsourced services
- Recruitment and training
- Office and other shared costs
HDI defines the operating-cost calculation and lists salaries, indirect staff, technology, facilities and training among the included expenses. It identifies handle time and agent use as the main cost drivers. [3]
Let’s suppose a software company spends £480,000 a year on its support operation and resolves 40,000 tickets.
The calculation is:
£480,000 ÷ 40,000 = £12 per ticket
That £12 average will be a mix of easy-to-solve questions and very complex ones. You will need richer data if you want to improve your support service.
Engineering’s involvement changes the calculation
A defect report can consume hours of a developer’s time. Even before anyone fixes the software, the investigation has become expensive.
The actual figure will depend on salaries, overheads and the length of the investigation, but if we assume a ticket required:
- 30 minutes of support time, at a fully loaded cost of £35 an hour
- Two hours of developer time, at £70 an hour
The labour cost would be £157.50. This is made up of:
- Support: £17.50
- Development: £140
This illustrates why it’s important to track engineering-linked tickets separately.
Self-service costs less, but only when it works
ContactBabel reports a direct self-service cost of 10p in the UK, compared with £6.25 for a phone interaction.[2]
A Gartner survey of 5,728 customers found that only 14% of customer-service issues were fully resolved through self-service. Even among problems described as very simple, the resolution rate was 36%.[4]
This is a happens when customers cannot find the right information. Gartner reported that 43% of failed self-service attempts involved an inability to find content relevant to the problem.[4]
Use support data to find documentation requirements
Let’s suppose customers raise 500 tickets each month about the same configuration task. Your average cost is £12 per ticket.
That problem costs:
500 × £12 = £6,000 a month
Preventing one quarter of those tickets would, in theory, save:
125 × £12 × 12 months = £18,000 a year
That’s not a guaranteed saving, but you can use it as a target for the documentation team.
You can measure ticket volume for that task before and after you’ve added the documentation. You can also check whether customers who view the article still contact support.
Better documentation also cuts handling time
Documentation can also reduce the cost of tickets that could not be prevented:
- An agent who can find an approved answer in a minute will work faster than one searching old tickets or asking a colleague.
- A troubleshooting article can tell customers which logs to collect before they contact support.
- A known-issues page can stop several agents investigating the same defect from scratch.
HDI states that longer ticket-handling time raises cost because service desks are labour-intensive.[3]
Internal documentation matters here as much as public help. Support teams need diagnostic procedures, and escalation rules.
AI support depends on the same source material
An AI assistant can retrieve an answer faster than a customer can search a large help centre. But it cannot fix missing facts.
If you feed it outdated instructions, it will return outdated instructions.
If you give it several conflicting articles, it has to choose between them.
Those wrong answers could lead to more expensive support tickets, refunds, or engineering investigations.
You should measure successful resolutions, rather than the number of chatbot conversations.
How Cherryleaf can help
Cherryleaf helps software companies improve online help, knowledge bases, troubleshooting content and internal support information.
We can analyse recurring tickets, identify missing or ineffective content, and calculate where documentation work is most likely to reduce support costs.
The goal is fewer avoidable tickets, shorter handling times, and better information for customers and support staff.
Sources
[1] MetricNet service-desk benchmarks.
InvGate reproduces MetricNet’s 2021 North American averages of $17.19 for voice, $16.13 for email and $15.72 for chat. It also defines cost per ticket as total operating cost divided by resolved tickets.
[2] ContactBabel, The Inner Circle Guide to Self-Service, updated December 2025.
The study, based on surveys of more than 400 UK and US organisations, reports direct costs of 10p/15c for self-service and £6.25/$7.16 for a phone interaction.
[3] HDI and MetricNet, “Understanding the Service Desk Metric of Cost per Ticket.”
[4] Gartner customer self-service survey, August 2024.
Gartner surveyed 5,728 customers. Fourteen per cent fully resolved their issue in self-service; 43% of failed attempts involved customers being unable to find relevant content.
Leave a Reply