Containment rate

The share of conversations an agent handled without a human, what it does not tell you, and why it rises when an agent gets worse.

The share of conversations that finished without a person being involved. Also called automation rate or self-service rate, depending on the vendor.

containment = conversations with no human / all conversations

It measures who, not whether

Containment counts who handled the conversation. It says nothing about whether the customer got what they came for.

A customer who gave up and left is contained. A customer who was told something wrong and believed it is contained. Both are counted as success.

The number can rise as quality falls

Make the handoff harder to reach and containment goes up. Remove the path to a person entirely and it approaches 100 percent.

That is why containment alone is unsafe as a target. Optimised in isolation it rewards exactly the behaviour customers hate most.

Read it beside task completion, which asks whether they actually got the thing. Task completion rate