Cost per contact

A contact centre is the team and tooling that handle inbound customer contacts across every channel, including voice, chat, email, and social. The term replaced call centre as support expanded beyond telephony, and it covers workforce management, quality assurance, and routing as well as the agents themselves.

Average handle time is the mean time an agent spends on a single contact, including talk or chat time and after-contact work. Because the definition varies between teams, comparisons are only meaningful when both sides confirm whether wrap-up time is included inside the calculation being reported.

Occupancy rate is the portion of an agent’s logged-in time spent actively handling contacts rather than waiting for them. Sustained high occupancy predicts burnout and attrition, so workforce planners treat it as a health measure rather than a productivity target to be maximised.

Automation rate is the percentage of incoming contacts handled entirely without a human agent. It measures reach rather than quality, so support teams read it alongside containment rate and satisfaction scores to confirm that automated volume is genuinely resolved rather than simply absorbed and later reopened by the customer.