Resolution rate is the share of customer conversations that finish without a person getting involved.

Why two vendors quoting the same number mean different things

There is no standard definition, and the choices made inside it change the result
enormously. Four common ones:

  • No human replied. Generous. Counts a customer who gave up and left.
  • No human replied and the customer did not come back within 24 hours.
    Better. Still counts the customer who went to a competitor.
  • No human replied and the customer said they were satisfied. Strict,
    and limited by how few people answer surveys.
  • No human replied and the thing the customer wanted actually happened.
    The one that matters, and the hardest to measure.

Before comparing anyone’s resolution rate to anyone else’s, ask which of those four it
is. The honest answer is often that nobody checked.

Resolution is not the same as a conversation or a response

These three get used interchangeably and should not be.

  • A response is one reply.
  • A conversation is one customer exchange, made of several responses.
  • A resolution is a conversation closed without a person. Not every
    conversation produces one.

This matters commercially as well as operationally. Tools priced per resolution and
tools priced per response are not comparable until you convert. Your cost per resolution
is responses per conversation, times the rate, divided by your resolution rate.

What a realistic number looks like

It depends almost entirely on what your conversations are made of, not on the quality
of the AI. A store whose inbox is mostly order-status questions can automate most of it,
because the answer is a lookup. A clinic whose inbox is mostly clinical questions cannot,
and should not try.

One figure we can give with its scope: for one bakery merchant, AeroChat handles 87 to
94% of conversations with no person, through festive peaks. That is one merchant, one
business type, one period. It is not a platform-wide figure and we do not present it as
one. Any vendor quoting a single percentage without saying whose conversations produced it
is quoting their best case.

How to work out your own

  1. Take 200 recent conversations.
  2. Mark each: finished without a person, needed a person, or customer disappeared.
  3. Read the “needed a person” pile and sort it into questions that needed judgment and
    questions that needed a system lookup.

The second pile is your actual headroom. Everything in it failed because the tool could
not reach a system, not because it could not understand. That is a connection problem, and
it is fixable.

Related terms

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