What is containment rate?

Containment rate is the share of bot conversations that ended without being escalated to a person: one minus escalated conversations divided by all bot conversations. Unlike deflection, it can be counted exactly, because every conversation either was handed off or was not. That precision is why vendors like it and why it is easy to misread.

It matters as a volume figure. A containment rate of 70 percent means the team saw 30 percent of conversations, which sizes the inbox, the staffing and the bill under a per-resolution pricing model. It is also a quick health check over time: containment falling on one topic usually means content went stale or a new question arrived that no page answers, and containment rising after a content fix is the fix working.

Where the idea runs out: a visitor who got a wrong answer and closed the tab counts as contained. So does a visitor who met a fallback message, declined the offer of a person and left. Containment shows where chats ended, not whether anyone was helped, so a high rate can mean a good agent or an agent that never offers a handoff. Read it beside resolution rate under a strict definition and beside CSAT, and treat a containment figure quoted without its escalation policy as unverifiable. Some vendors label this number resolution, automation rate or self-service rate, which is the split to watch for.