Resolution rate
Resolution rate is the share of customer conversations that finish without a person getting involved.
Four definitions in use
There is no standard definition, and the choice changes the result a lot.
- No person replied. The loosest. It counts a customer who gave up and left.
- No person replied, and the customer didn’t come back within 24 hours. Better, but it still counts the customer who went to a competitor.
- No person replied, and the customer said they were satisfied. Strict, and limited by how few people answer surveys.
- No person replied, and what the customer wanted actually happened. The one that matters, and the hardest to measure.
Before comparing anyone’s resolution rate with anyone else’s, ask which of these it is.
Response, conversation, resolution
- A response is one AI reply. This is what AeroChat bills.
- A conversation is one customer exchange, made of several responses.
- A resolution is a conversation closed without a person. Not every conversation ends in one.
Tools priced per resolution and tools priced per response can’t be compared until you convert. Cost per resolution is responses per conversation, times the rate, divided by your resolution rate. See conversation-based pricing.
The public figures
| Figure | Scope |
|---|---|
| 14% of customer service issues fully resolved in self-service | Gartner survey of 5,728 customers, December 2023 |
| 36% fully resolved in self-service, for issues customers called very simple | Same survey |
| 80% of common customer service issues resolved by agentic AI without human intervention by 2029 | Gartner forecast, March 2025 |
Sources: Gartner press releases of 19 August 2024 (as reported by CRM Magazine) and 5 March 2025.
The first two cover self-service of every kind as customers met it in 2023: help centres, FAQ pages and bots. The third is Gartner’s forecast for AI that carries out tasks, such as changing an order, rather than only answering.
What it means in practice
Your rate depends mostly on what your conversations are about. A store whose inbox is mostly order-status questions can automate most of it, because each answer is a lookup. A clinic whose inbox is mostly clinical questions can’t, and shouldn’t 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 and one period, and we don’t present it as a platform-wide figure. When a vendor quotes a single percentage, ask whose conversations produced it.
How to work out your own
- Take 200 recent conversations.
- Mark each one: finished without a person, needed a person, or customer disappeared.
- Split the “needed a person” pile into conversations that needed judgment and ones that needed a lookup in a system.
The lookup pile is your headroom. Those conversations reached a person because the tool couldn’t reach a system, and connecting the system fixes them.
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Find your own resolution rate
Start your 7-day free trial. No credit card needed. Connect the system behind your lookup pile, such as orders or bookings, and see how many of those conversations AeroChat closes in a week.
On Shopify? Install AeroChat from the Shopify App Store.