The most frequent theme is not always the most expensive
Most support teams know which contact reasons are the most frequent. Fewer know how many hours each one takes. The difference matters: a theme with few but difficult tickets can cost more than a theme with many quick ones.
Calculating cost per theme answers two questions the ticket count does not: where the team’s time goes, and how much you would gain if a theme stopped coming in.
Three numbers per theme
Cost = conversations × minutes per conversation ÷ 60 × hourly cost
- Conversations: how many tickets, calls or chats had this theme in the period. Count conversations, not messages: a ticket with five replies is one conversation.
- Minutes per conversation: how long the team works on one, on average.
- Hourly cost: what one hour of a support person’s work costs the company.
Round only at the end. If you round at every step, small errors add up across all themes.
Not salary per hour, but cost per productive hour
The hourly cost is a person’s annual cost to the company divided by the hours they actually spend on conversations. A synthetic example:
| Step | Value |
|---|---|
| Annual cost to the company (salary, contributions, equipment) | €24,000 |
| Working hours per year (220 days × 8 hours) | 1,760 |
| Of those, on conversations (about 75%, excluding meetings, training, breaks) | 1,320 |
| Cost per productive hour (24,000 ÷ 1,320) | about €18 |
If people on the team have very different costs, or an outside partner charges by the hour, use the team average or the partner’s rate. For priority decisions, the order of magnitude is enough.
Measured where available, estimated where not
- If your helpdesk tracks time (many record how long an agent worked on each ticket), use it, per theme.
- If it does not, time about 20 conversations on an ordinary day and take the average. An estimate per channel (phone, email, chat) is more accurate than one for everything.
Do not use the time from opening to closing the ticket: it measures how long the customer waited, not how long the team worked.
Four themes, one month
A synthetic support team, with an hourly cost of €18:
| Theme | Conversations | Minutes / conversation | Hours | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Account access | 412 | 10 | 68.7 | €1,236 |
| Order status | 298 | 8 | 39.7 | €715 |
| Billing | 120 | 15 | 30.0 | €540 |
| Waiting time | 164 | 8 | 21.9 | €394 |
“Billing” is the least frequent theme, yet it costs more than “Waiting time”, because each conversation takes almost twice as long. In a list sorted by volume alone, it would come last.
And “Account access” on its own is about 69 hours a month, almost two weeks of one person’s work.
What a help article can solve, and what needs fixing
A theme is a good candidate for a help article when most of its conversations are questions (“how do I change…”, “where do I find…”), when it comes in steadily and not only in one spike, and when it costs enough to be worth the effort. A theme that is mostly complaints (“it doesn’t work”, “it was late”) needs a fix in the product or the process, not a text.
After you publish an article or make a fix, compare the theme’s conversations over the same number of days before and after. If, for example, 30% of the people asking about account access found the answer themselves, the team would gain about 20 hours a month. That share is only an example: the comparison will show yours.
How Sightelle does it
- It calculates each theme’s cost with the formula in this guide, per source, once the Owner sets minutes per conversation and an hourly cost. Without those numbers it shows no amount.
- Where the source provides actual working time, it uses that instead of the estimate.
- It suggests the themes that look solvable with a help article, using criteria like those in the paragraph above, and writes a draft article to get you started.
- It shows cost next to the value of the customers talking about the theme, never combined with it: one is an expense, the other is revenue at risk.
See the page for call centres and support, or read how to calculate NPS correctly.
See the cost in your own tickets
An export from your helpdesk or call centre, a few minutes, one document for management.