Glossary
Containment rate
Containment rate is the percentage of conversations that stayed inside the automated channel (bot, IVR, help centre) without being transferred to a human, whether or not the customer was helped.
Formula
Containment rate = (conversations not transferred to a human ÷ all conversations) × 100How to read it
Containment is the vendor-friendly cousin of deflection: it counts every conversation the bot did not transfer, including the ones where the visitor gave up. A bot with no handoff button has a 100% containment rate and furious customers.
Use containment only together with a satisfaction signal and a count of visitors who came back by another channel. Deflection with an honest "resolved" definition is the better headline number.
If you must report containment, publish the handoff rate next to it so readers can see that leaving the channel was possible.
In SupportLime
SupportLime makes handoff easy on purpose (low confidence, "talk to a person", the lead form), so its resolution rate is a deflection measure, not a containment measure.
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