For managing and finance directors
What routine technical support calls really cost a manufacturer
A line-by-line build-up of the cost of answering the same installer questions by phone, from UK pay data, and the costs that never show up on the support budget.
Lingo
5 min read
Ask a manufacturer what its technical helpline costs and you will usually get a headcount. That is the smallest part of the answer. This is the full build-up, line by line, using UK pay data, and the costs that never make it onto the support budget at all.
In short
- An advisor paid the UK median for an engineering technician costs about £51,977 a year, or £30 an hour, once employer National Insurance and pension are added.
- A 12-minute routine call costs about £6 in advisor time. 50 of them a day is about £74,680 a year, roughly 1.4 full-time people.
- Other costs sit outside the support budget: return visits, interrupted engineers, and installers who wait until morning.
Start with one advisor
Technical support advisors at manufacturers are rarely call-centre staff. They are usually former installers or engineers, and they are paid like it. The Office for National Statistics puts the full-time median for engineering technicians at £44,843 a year (2025, provisional). The figure covers employees in the same job for more than a year, in the tax year to April 2025. Electrical service and maintenance mechanics and repairers sit a little lower, at £41,662.
Salary is not cost. An employer pays National Insurance at 15% on earnings above £5,000 a year, in 2025 to 2026 and again in 2026 to 2027, and at least 3% of qualifying earnings into a pension.
What one advisor costs a year
Full-time median pay for an engineering technician, with the employer’s statutory costs on top
| Salary | Full-time median, SOC 3113 | £44,843 |
|---|---|---|
| Employer National Insurance | 15% of pay above £5,000 | £5,976 |
| Employer pension | 3% of pay above £6,240 | £1,158 |
| Cost to employ | Before desk, phone system, software or management | £51,977 |
A full-time contract of 37.5 hours a week is 1,950 hours a year. Take out the statutory 5.6 weeks of leave and 1,740 hours are left. That makes an advisor’s hour cost £30, and that figure is deliberately low: it leaves out sickness, training, team meetings, the phone system and the manager.
At that rate a 12-minute call, including the notes, costs about £6 in advisor time. For scale, ContactBabel’s 2024 survey of more than 200 UK contact centres put the average cost of an inbound call at £5.58 across all sectors. The two are not the same measure: the published summary does not break the average down, and a technical support call is answered by someone better paid than most contact centre staff.
Then multiply by the routine ones
The calls that matter here are the routine ones: the limit setting, the parameter, the fault code that is already in the manual. The chart shows what they add up to across a working year of 250 days, at two call lengths. The volumes and the call lengths are inputs for you to replace with your own.
Advisor cost of routine calls in a year
Illustrative. By calls a day, at 12 and 20 minutes a call. Hover or touch the chart to read the values.
| Routine calls a day | 12 minutes a call | 20 minutes a call |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | £14,936 | £24,893 |
| 20 | £29,872 | £49,786 |
| 30 | £44,808 | £74,680 |
| 40 | £59,744 | £99,573 |
| 50 | £74,680 | £124,466 |
| 60 | £89,616 | £149,359 |
| 70 | £104,551 | £174,252 |
| 80 | £119,487 | £199,146 |
| 90 | £134,423 | £224,039 |
| 100 | £149,359 | £248,932 |
At 50 routine calls a day and 12 minutes each, that is 2,500 hours a year: about 1.4 people doing nothing but repeating what the manual says, at a cost of about £74,680. If the calls run to 20 minutes, it is £124,466.
The costs that are not on the support budget
Advisor time is the cost that is easy to see. These four land in other people’s budgets, and nobody adds them up.
Return visits
When an installer cannot get an answer, the job is often left and finished another day. Field service research gives a sense of scale, though it measures service organisations’ own engineers, not installers. In Aberdeen Group’s 2013 survey the average first-time fix rate was 75%, and each call not fixed first time needed 1.6 further dispatches on average. The service software company Aquant’s 2026 benchmark, drawn from 161 organisations’ records, puts failed visits at 25% of total service cost at the median. The two findings measure different things, a share of calls and a share of cost, thirteen years apart.
Engineers taken off development
What the helpline cannot answer goes to whoever knows the product best, usually someone in engineering. Their hour costs more than an advisor’s, and the cost of breaking their concentration is not counted anywhere.
Questions that wait for the morning
A technical helpline open from eight to five on weekdays covers 45 of the 168 hours in a week. Worcester Bosch publishes 7am to 6pm on weekdays and 8.30am to 4pm on Saturdays, which is 62.5. A question at six in the evening waits, and so do the installer, the customer and the job.
The relationship
Installers who cannot get through call the distributor, and the distributor calls you. Each link in that chain costs someone time.
An installer who has waited twice will recommend whichever brand answered.
What a guide changes
A guide drafted from your own documentation, checked and published by your team, can answer documented questions on WhatsApp at any hour. A request for a person still reaches your team. How much of your routine volume that covers depends on how much of it is documented, which is why the next step is a count.
The useful number is your own. Count a week of calls by topic, as the one-week tally sets out, then put your volumes into the support cost calculator. The calculator works from salary alone, so its figure is the lower, conservative one; this article adds employer National Insurance and pension.
Sources
- Occupation (4 digit SOC) ASHE: Table 14, 2025 provisionalOffice for National Statistics, 2025. Table 14.7a, full-time annual median. SOC 3113, coefficient of variation 3.9%.
- Rates and thresholds for employers 2025 to 2026HM Revenue and Customs, January 2025.
- Rates and thresholds for employers 2026 to 2027HM Revenue and Customs, 2026. Employer rate and secondary threshold unchanged.
- Workplace pensions: what you, your employer and the government payGOV.UK, accessed October 2026.
- Survey reveals pressure on cost and performance levels to grow in 2024Call Centre Helper, reporting ContactBabel, February 2024.
- Fixing first-time fix: repairing field service efficiency to enhance customer returnsAberdeen Group, March 2013.
- Aquant’s 2026 field service benchmarkAquant, via GlobeNewswire, February 2026. Vendor research. Figures are from the published press release.
- Worcester support teamWorcester Bosch, accessed October 2026. Published opening hours of the technical support line.
Questions people ask
How much does a technical support call cost a UK manufacturer?
Built up from UK pay data, an advisor paid the median for an engineering technician costs about £30 an hour once employer National Insurance and pension are added. A 12-minute call therefore costs about £6 in advisor time alone, before the phone system, management, office space or the time of any engineer it is passed to.
How many people does it take to answer 50 routine calls a day?
At 12 minutes a call, 50 calls a day for 250 working days is 2,500 hours a year, or about 1.4 full-time people once leave is taken out. At 20 minutes a call it is about 2.4 people.
What costs do routine support calls create outside the support budget?
Return visits when an installer leaves a job unfinished, senior engineers interrupted from development work, installers and customers waiting when the helpline is closed, and the relationship cost with distributors whose installers cannot get through.
