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Balancing Cost Per Support Interaction

2025 has been the year of the “GenAI Chat Bot” for customer support. It doesn’t matter where you look, it seems like that’s the only thing people are talking about. However, with the rush to implement AI, many companies have lost sight of the basics of customer support.

Most companies look at the entirety of Customer Support as purely a cost-center. But the reality is, the cost of Customer Support is a sliding scale.

If we ignore customer satisfaction, and all other extraneous metrics, you have live agent phone support or the Office of the President as your most expensive channel, and written tutorials and FAQs as the cheapest channel. All of your other channels are going to fall somewhere in-between those two extremes.  


Support interactions are calculated based on their cost per contact. The further you move to the left, the more money you save each time a customer utilizes the content. The further to the right, the more cost you incur for each interaction.

If you consider the seesaw above, you can describe everything to the left of center as contact deflection, and everything to the right as a contact cost.


Contact Deflection: In general terms, Contact Deflection is anything that solves a problem for a customer so that they don’t have to contact you. These assets have a one-time cost associated with their creation, but don’t cost money for each use. Depending on their cost, they either have an ROI (Automation projects), or an immediate cost benefit (Articles / Videos).

Either way: the more the assets are used, the more money they save you.

Contact Deflection = Cost Savings


Customer Contacts: Loosely defined as any time you interact with a customer, and incur a cost associated with the work. Think of this in terms of your average cost/contact in the call center.

Customer Contacts = Cost Incurrence

 

A Winning Strategy

The best way to drive efficiencies and cost savings in your support operations is to move as many interactions as possible from the right side of the see-saw to the left side. This moves the customer interaction from a cost-per-interaction model to a flat-fee model.


Step 1: Identify your top contact drivers for the call center or chat agents. You should know what these are at all times, and what the average handle time for each is.

Step 2: Classify how complex they are.

Simple knowledge transfer: Make sure you have an article/video/both created that answers the question. Promote it on your website, and make sure it’s one of the first things customers see for support.

Complex action: If the top contact driver is more complex then a knowledge transfer, can you automate or simplify the interaction? Is there a technology solution that allows you to pay once, and then the problem is solved forever?

Step 3: Implement contact deflection assets that drive down the total volume in your call centers.

Step 4: If you can’t fully move the interaction from the right side of the scale to the left, can you slide it further to the left then it is now? Instead of a live agent, can a machine learning agent or GenAI agent handle the work?

Step 5: Anything that needs to stay with an agent and remains: Identify how you can simplify the agent’s workflow. Make them faster, more accurate and more empowered.

 


The 2025 (Losing) Strategy

We’ve seen hundreds of companies implementing AI Chat Bots this year, which is moving their interactions from the far right, to slightly less right. The interactions are cheaper, but they aren’t actually eliminating the interaction, they just cost less.

Don’t pay money to create AI chatbots for interactions that could have been cheaper and easier to handle with knowledge content and full automation. GenAI has its place, but it’s not a magic bullet.

 


Building your Omni-Channel Strategy for 2026

  • Make sure you truly understand your top contact drivers. Gather the metrics, understand the customer need, and determine what is the best way to fulfill those needs.

  • Create cost-per-contact values for each channel you maintain: Phone = $10, Chat = $8, GenAI - $1, KM Articles saves $6.70

  • When balancing budget and needs, as we all are. Leverage GenAI to super-power your agents instead of leveraging it to replace agents.

    • Implementing GenAI that reduces the average handle time of all interactions by 10% will drive significantly more cost savings then moving 10% of your volume to a GenAI agent.

  • And because customer support doesn’t interact in a vacuum: Let’s reintroduce those CX metrics we discarded earlier. Constantly measure and understand how each of your channels are performing. What is driving customer satisfaction, and what is driving churn? If your customers hate a specific channel, don’t force them to use is because it saves you a few dollars.


Never Forget: Customer Churn is significantly more expensive than Customer Support. But Customer Support can absolutely reduce and improve churn.

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