What is Chatbot Containment Rate? Everything You Need to Know

By Aayushi | July 23, 2024 11:59 am

When you incorporate chatbot into your customer service strategy, it’s not only about creating, training and deploying it on your website and letting it be. It is also important to track its activities and evaluate its effectiveness using certain performance metrics. One such metric is chatbot containment rate which measures the bot’s overall performance and helps analyze its strengths and weaknesses. This guide will cover everything you need to know about the chatbot containment rate including its importance, calculation, benefits and much more. Let’s get started.

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What is Chatbot Containment Rate: Overview and Importance
Chatbot Containment Rate: Calculation and Analysis
Challenges in Achieving a High Containment Rate and How to Overcome Them?
Top 5 Benefits of a High Chatbot Containment Rate
Conclusion

What is Chatbot Containment Rate: Overview and Importance

Chatbot containment rate, simply known as containment rate, is a key performance metric which measures a chatbot’s performance and helps analyze whether it’s working within the allotted framework and in accordance with the business goals or not. It assesses a chatbot’s capabilities in terms of responding to customer queries accurately, understanding user intent, generating contextually relevant answers and so on, without any help from a human agent. A high containment rate indicates an efficient chatbot performance- both in its structure and working, whereas a low rate indicates poor performance and a scope for improvement.

It’s important to calculate the chatbot containment rate to identify pain points in the customer service chatbot and make prompt improvements in the system to optimize customer experience in the future. In other words, this rate represents the percentage of user interactions handled by a chatbot successfully without any human intervention and thus is an important metric in analyzing the overall efficiency of the chatbot and its impact on customer satisfaction at large. Before moving ahead with ways to achieve a high containment rate, let’s first learn to calculate and interpret it.

Chatbot Containment Rate: Calculation and Analysis

It’s quite easy to calculate the chatbot containment rate and requires only 3 steps to be followed, which are:

Clearly Defining Metrics

The first step in calculating containment rate is defining the key metrics on which the chatbot’s structure and working need to be judged. This involves two main aspects: first, the number of user interactions handled by a chatbot without the need of human intervention and second, the total number of user-bot interactions.

Collecting User-Bot Interaction Data

The next step is to ensure that all data in the user-bot’s conversation including any information provided by the user is collected and stored in a secure location. This is to keep a record of all interactions which helps figuring out which all conversations were handled by the chatbot single-handedly and successfully.

Calculating Chatbot Containment Rate

The final step after gathering all important data is to actually calculate the containment rate. The formula for calculating it is:

Containment Rate (in %) = (Number of Interactions Handled by the Bot / Total Number of Interactions) * 100

On applying this formula, you can calculate the chatbot containment rate percentage with ease.

Now, looking at how to analyze the results after the containment rate is calculated. Here are some points to keep in mind:

High Containment Rate: A rate of usually 80% or above is considered as a high containment rate and is a positive sign implying that your chatbot is handling a good number of user interactions successfully without any human intervention.
Low Containment Rate: A rate below 70% is considered as a low chatbot containment rate and implies a poor performance by the chatbot in handling a large number of user interactions without the help of a human agent. It is a negative sign which necessitates improvements to be made in the chatbot’s structure and working.
Moderate Containment Rate: A rate between 70%-80% is a moderate chatbot containment rate and is usually ideal for businesses. It implies that a chatbot is able to handle a considerable number of user interactions without human intervention and a human agent is required for help only when dealing with complex queries like sensitive user issues.

These insights can help you judge your chatbot’s performance in an accurate and effective manner.

Challenges in Achieving a High Containment Rate and How to Overcome Them?

There are quite a few challenges you might face while trying to achieve a high containment rate. Let’s discuss these one by one and learn how to overcome them as and when they arise. The top 3 challenges are as follows:

Complex User Queries

A chatbot might not be able to understand and respond to certain complex user queries that involve technical information requiring in-depth knowledge on a particular topic. This degrades customer experience as they’re left unanswered or have to contact a human agent to get their query resolved.

To avoid this situation, a chatbot’s knowledge base needs to be constantly updated with new information about customer needs, interests and preferences as well as other important data necessary for answering queries in an accurate and contextually-relevant manner. Additionally, in case human intervention is required, an option for a conversation handoff can be added in the bot flow and a strong human-AI collaboration can be maintained for enhancing user experience.

Ambiguous Queries

Sometimes, users type in ambiguous information and frame it in a language the chatbot is not able to understand properly. This would lead to the users being prompted with a message like “I’m sorry, I can’t understand your query.” which causes frustration in their minds and may lead to them leaving the website.

A good way to overcome this challenge is to set limits with respect to the extent of creativity allowed to users in typing their queries as well as building a robust system of natural language processing backing up the chatbot to help it understand, analyze and respond to user queries in real-time.

Lack of Multilingual Support

Some companies have a global target audience with different linguistic backgrounds but their customer support chatbot is not equipped with multi-linguistic capabilities. Simply put, a chatbot is not able to comprehend some user queries because it cannot converse well in the language in which the query is written.

To overcome this and improve the chatbot’s functionalities, the bot can be trained well in multiple languages to help it understand and respond to such queries with a complete understanding of user intent. This would help optimize the chatbot experience for users across the globe and increase its scope.

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Top 5 Benefits of a High Chatbot Containment Rate

Now that you have a better understanding of chatbot containment rate, you might be thinking why exactly is a high rate desired and what benefits it provides. Here are the top 5 benefits it provides:

Efficient Performance Measurement

The most important benefit a high chatbot containment rate provides is that it allows for efficient measurement of a chatbot’s performance by evaluating its ability to provide chat assistance and generate accurate responses to resolve a large number of user inquiries without any human intervention. This helps companies figure out the drawbacks their chatbot has and make necessary improvements at the right time.

Reduced User Frustration and Complaints

A high containment rate implies that most conversations are handled successfully by the chatbot thereby satisfying a large number of users and reducing the volume of complaints arising due to user frustration. This improves the company’s brand image at large as a higher number of satisfied users leads to a good perception about the company in the market.

Increased User Satisfaction

If a chatbot has a high containment rate, it means it can cater to users well within time and provide them useful information that’s relevant to their queries. This reduces user wait time and frustration and enhances their experience conversing with the chatbot. With increased user satisfaction, there is a higher chance of lead generation as well as customer retention.

Also Read: A Guide to Customer Retention Strategies

Quick Response Generation

For an enhanced user experience, the most important factor is promptness of response generation. Users do not like to wait for long times or go through a complex procedure to get their queries resolved. This makes it important to speed up generation of responses by the chatbot and the ones with a high containment rate are able to achieve that with efficiency.

Reduced Workload for Human Agents

A high containment rate equips chatbots to successfully resolve user queries without the need for any human intervention. This frees up time for human agents and allows them to focus on other complex tasks that require their attention. Not only does this save them time and effort, but also reduces their workload and relieves them of carrying out routine work like responding to user queries. This is a great benefit that ensures efficient utilization of human resources leading to cost and time saving, and also provides the opportunity for scalability and growth.

Conclusion

In conclusion, chatbot containment rate is a crucial metric that measures the effectiveness of a chatbot in resolving customer queries without any human help. Businesses need to work towards achieving a high containment rate to ensure that the chatbot can single-handedly resolve a major part of user queries leading to improved customer service and cost saving for the company. The containment rate can be easily calculated using a simple formula and can provide the company a number of useful insights to help them make necessary improvements and achieve efficiency!

Aayushi