Containment rate

What it is

Containment is the headline KPI in almost every voice-agent business case. The honest definition counts a call as contained only when the caller's intent was completed and the result exists in the system of record: an appointment in the schedule, a payment posted, a claim status delivered against the right policy. The lax definition counts any call that did not transfer to a person, including hang-ups, abandoned calls and callers who gave up and rang back.

The two definitions can differ by tens of percentage points on the same traffic.

Why it matters when buying

Containment drives the financial model: each contained call is a call a person did not handle. If the vendor's dashboard reports the lax number, the business case is wrong and the customer-experience damage (people who left without a result) is invisible. Containment also has to be read alongside transfer rate, repeat-call rate and complaint rate; a high containment figure with a rising repeat-call rate means the agent is losing callers rather than helping them.

What to ask

Ask for the exact definition of "contained" in the vendor's reporting, and whether it is checked against your system of record or inferred from the call ending. Ask for containment by intent, not overall; scheduling might contain at 70 percent while billing disputes contain at 10. Write your definition into the contract and any service-level commitment. The methodology page uses "completed outcome in the system of record" throughout.