Chatbot Containment Rate: What it is & How to Improve it

‍Chatbots are transforming customer support.

Once limited to answering simple FAQs, they’ve now evolved into intelligent virtual agents capable of handling a range of queries and tasks.

And they’re only getting smarter.

Gartner predicts that AI agents will resolve 80% of customer service queries by 2029, making automated systems a key driver of service efficiency.

But with increased automation comes increased pressure to perform - and one of the most telling performance metrics in this space is chatbot containment rate.

In this blog, we’ll break down what chatbot containment rate means, why it matters, and how you can improve it to deliver better results for both your business and your customers.

We’ll cover:

• What is chatbot containment rate?
• How to calculate chatbot containment rate
• The importance of chatbot containment rate
• Best practices to improve containment rate

TL;DR: How to improve containment rate

1. Analyse bot analytics: Use data to identify drop-off points, escalation trends, and performance gaps.
2. Leverage artificial intelligence: Upgrade to AI-powered chatbots that can better understand intent, handle more complex queries, and deliver accurate, human-like responses.
3. Create a comprehensive knowledge base: Build and maintain a robust, well-structured content base to help your chatbot answer a wider range of queries independently.
4. Integrate with backend systems: Connect your chatbot to CRMs and other internal systems via APIs to automate more tasks and enable personalised support.
5. Improve escalation paths: Ensure seamless handoffs to human agents when needed - making containment a helpful choice, not a frustrating limitation.
6. Monitor performance: Continuously track containment rate, other key metrics, and customer feedback to make data-driven adjustments and keep improving.

What is chatbot containment rate?

Chatbot containment rate measures how many interactions your chatbot handles from start to finish - without needing help from a human agent.

Put simply, it’s the percentage of customer queries your bot can resolve without human intervention.

It’s a key performance indicator that reflects your chatbot’s effectiveness - especially when it comes to response accuracy, first-contact resolution, and overall service quality.

A high chatbot containment rate typically indicates a well-trained, capable chatbot that delivers accurate responses, reduces support costs, and enhances both operational efficiency and user satisfaction.

On the other hand, a low chatbot containment rate usually signals a low-quality, under-performing bot that is failing to meet the needs of your customers.

For well-implemented customer service chatbots, the typical benchmark for containment rate is 70-90%.

Aiming for a 100% containment rate isn’t realistic (or even desirable), as some customer interactions are too complex or sensitive and will require human intervention to ensure the best possible experience.

Containment rate vs. other key metrics

Containment rate is a powerful metric - but it doesn’t tell the whole story on its own.

To truly understand your chatbot’s performance, you need to look at it alongside other key metrics like:

• Escalation rate: The percentage of interactions that get handed over to a human agent.
• Response time: How quickly the chatbot generates a response to customer messages.
• Resolution time: How long the chatbot takes to fully resolve a user query.
• User satisfaction (CSAT score): How satisfied customers are with the chatbot, often measured through post-chat surveys/ratings or user feedback.
• Abandonment rate: The number of interactions that are abandoned by the customer before a resolution is reached.

Each of these performance metrics provides valuable context around how your chatbot handles user interactions.

For example, a high containment rate is great - but if it’s paired with poor user satisfaction or long resolution times, that may signal the bot’s responses aren’t actually helping.

That’s why chatbot performance analytics should be viewed holistically.

Other metrics complement containment rate by helping you understand not just whether the bot avoids intervention, but also whether it resolves the issue without human assistance.

Ultimately, chatbot containment rate isn’t the only metric you should track - but it is one of the most valuable indicators of a successful chatbot strategy.

How to calculate chatbot containment rate

Chatbot containment rate can be calculated using a simple formula:

(Number of resolved interactions without human involvement ÷ Total number of chatbot interactions) × 100

This gives you the percentage of queries your chatbot resolves independently.

That said, most chatbot platforms come with analytics tools that will automatically track this for you.

This makes measuring containment rate easy, enabling you to identify trends and spot areas for improvement without crunching the numbers manually.

Why is chatbot containment rate important?

A high containment rate is more than just a performance stat - it’s a clear indicator of how well your chatbot is serving both your business and your customers.

Let’s take a closer look at why it matters.

Chatbot performance

Containment rate is a key indicator of overall chatbot performance.

A high containment rate is often a sign that your chatbot is doing its job well.

It shows that the bot can handle a wide range of inputs, deliver relevant and accurate responses, and handle tasks without escalation.

That means your chatbot’s ability to manage customer queries independently is strong - and that your automation setup is working as intended.

Cost savings & efficiency

From an operational standpoint, a high containment rate can lead to significant cost savings and increased chatbot ROI.

In fact, companies using chatbots save up to 30% on customer support costs.

When more customer queries are resolved without human intervention, you reduce your reliance on human agents for routine support.

This not only reduces costs but also eases pressure on your team and increases overall operational efficiency.

It also frees up human agents to focus on more complex tasks and the kind of interactions where a human touch really matters.

In short, a high chatbot containment rate helps you do more with less, improving productivity and reducing operational costs without sacrificing service quality.

Customer satisfaction & customer experience

An efficient chatbot isn’t just good for your business and team - it’s good for your customers too.

When a chatbot provides quick, helpful responses and resolves queries in one go, it directly boosts customer satisfaction and contributes to an enhanced user experience.

Case in point, the average satisfaction rate of bot-only chats is 87.6%, which is two percentage points higher than the CSAT rate for bot interactions that are escalated to human agents.

However, when containment is low and user queries are frequently passed to human support, it can create unnecessary friction, delays, and frustration.

That’s why improving chatbot containment rate can play a key role in raising customer satisfaction scores, enhancing CX, and delivering seamless chatbot interactions from start to finish.

How to improve chatbot containment rate: Best practices

Improving your chatbot containment rate requires a combination of smart chatbot design, continuous training optimisation, and the right technical foundations behind the scenes.

The following chatbot best practices will help you build a clear strategy for boosting bot performance and reducing human intervention.

1. Analyse chatbot analytics

The first step to improving your chatbot containment rate is understanding where it’s falling short - and that starts with data.

Most chatbot platforms include built-in analytics tools that offer valuable insights into user interactions, including:

• Where users drop off
• Which queries get escalated to a human agent
• What types of customer inquiries are resolved successfully

You can use this data to identify areas for improvement in your bot’s setup, training, and escalation logic.

For example, if users regularly abandon chats when requesting an order status update, it could indicate a missing integration with your CRM or other backend systems.

Some chatbot solutions also offer advanced analytics and reporting features that can help with analysing your chatbot interaction data.

With Talkative, for example, you can run reports that'll analyse all the queries your bot failed to resolve and use this information to identify gaps in the chatbot's knowledge.

In turn, the report will provide suggested content you can add to the knowledge base to ensure your bot will be able to answer these queries in the future - optimising performance and containment rate over time.

2. Leverage artificial intelligence

Not all chatbots are built the same.

Traditional chatbots rely on decision trees - rigid, rule-based flows that can only handle predefined user queries.

While these bots can effectively answer FAQs, they often fall short when customers stray from the script or ask more complex questions, resulting in a poor containment rate.

So, if you want to optimise containment, you should consider implementing an AI-powered chatbot solution.

By using technologies like natural language processing (NLP), conversational AI, generative AI, and large language models (LLMs), AI bots can better understand context, intent, and variations in user inputs - even when phrased in unexpected ways.

This allows them to deliver human-like responses, maintain context, and handle a broader range of queries in a conversational way.

The result? Smoother and smarter automated support, an enhanced customer experience, and a higher chatbot containment rate.

3. Improve your chatbot's knowledge base

Your chatbot’s knowledge base is the foundation of its ability to deliver quick, accurate answers.

Without it, even the most advanced AI chatbot will struggle to resolve user queries - leading to missed opportunities, poor customer satisfaction, and a low containment rate.

To ensure your chatbot handles customer interactions effectively, your AI knowledge base should:

• Include up-to-date information on products, services, policies, and processes.
• Cover a wide range of topics and content, such as FAQs, support articles, troubleshooting guides, etc.
• Be well-formatted and written in clear, user-friendly language that aligns with your brand tone.

The more robust and comprehensive your knowledge base is, the more equipped your chatbot will be to provide accurate responses and resolve queries autonomously.

It's also important to regularly update and refine your knowledge base to keep content up-to-date and to address any gaps.

As we've covered, this can easily be done with reporting features like Talkative's AI Knowledge Base Suggestions.

Knowledge base optimisation is essential for continuous improvement, helping you identify areas where the bot needs more information and where content gaps might be hurting containment rate and overall performance.

4. Integrate with backend systems

One of the best ways to increase chatbot containment rate is to give it access to the right data behind the scenes.

By integrating it with your CRM and other backend systems via APIs, a chatbot can handle more complex requests, pull real-time information, and deliver personalised responses.

This minimises the need for manual intervention, enabling the chatbot to automate tasks like:

• Providing order status updates
• Carrying out user authentication
• Making bookings and scheduling appointments
• Retrieving billing information and answering account inquiries

Ultimately, integration expands and strengthens your chatbot’s capabilities, resulting in more successful interactions and resolutions as well as increased containment rate.

5. Improve escalation paths

A high chatbot containment rate is a great goal - but it shouldn’t come at the cost of user satisfaction.

Sometimes, customer issues need the human touch. In those moments, a smooth and timely handoff to a live agent is essential.

That’s why improving your escalation paths is just as important as boosting containment.

Make sure your chatbot can:

• Recognise when a query falls outside its scope
• Promptly offer the option to speak with a human
• Seamlessly transfer the conversation, along with any relevant context, to the agent

This approach ensures that containment is a choice, not a dead end - and it shows customers that your bot is there to help, not hinder.

Handled well, escalation actually strengthens user engagement and contributes to a positive user experience, even if the interaction ends with human support.

6. Continuously monitor performance

Improving your chatbot containment rate is just the beginning - keeping it high requires ongoing performance management.

Once you’ve put the above best practices in place, it’s crucial to monitor whether they’re actually delivering results.

You can do this by tracking:

• Changes in containment rate and the volume of escalated interactions over time
• Shifts in customer satisfaction scores and response accuracy
• Patterns in user engagement and resolved interactions

Use this data alongside explicit feedback from customers to assess what’s working - and where your chatbot strategy needs further refinement.

Monitoring performance ensures you can adapt quickly, make targeted updates, and keep your chatbot’s capabilities aligned with customer expectations.

In short, continuous improvement isn’t optional - it’s essential for maintaining a high containment rate and delivering high-quality service long term.

The takeaway

A high containment rate is one of the clearest signs of an effective, efficient, and customer-friendly chatbot.

It shows that your chatbot handles customer service interactions and tasks successfully, reducing the need for human intervention while providing a positive user experience.

By following the strategies outlined in this article, you’ll have a solid foundation to start improving your containment rate.

But success doesn’t just come down to strategy - it also depends on having the right chatbot technology.

That’s where Talkative comes in.

Our platform provides a scalable and flexible AI chatbot solution that can be tailored to your specific business needs.

With the Talkative chatbot solution, you can...

• Deliver natural, human-like conversations powered by generative AI, natural language processing, and LLMs.
• Gain access to a huge range of AI reports and advanced analytics features.
• Create multiple AI knowledge bases that make your chatbot an expert in your brand, products, and services.
• Meet and serve customers across your website, app, and social messaging platforms.
• Seamlessly escalate to human agents when needed.
• Provide multilingual customer support without any additional downloads or plugins.

In addition to chatbots, we offer a suite of customer support channels - including voice AI for phone support, live chat, video chat, messaging, and more.

Want to learn more?

Reach out to us with any questions or book a demo today.