Product Insights

McKinsey recently found something counterintuitive about AI-driven customer care: a bank’s AI agent can hit a 90 percent containment rate on disputes, resolving nine out of ten calls without ever escalating, and the bank’s total cost per contact can still go up. If the customer calls back three days later because the root cause was never fixed, the bot didn’t solve anything. It just added a step. McKinsey is careful to note this isn’t a failure of the AI itself. It’s a failure of treating a technical metric, containment, as if it were a business outcome. That gap between “ticket closed” and “problem solved” is playing out across every industry putting AI in front of customer support. Containment rates climb, and executives assume satisfaction is holding steady. But from the customer’s perspective, closing a ticket isn’t the same as solving the problem. They still hit a wall, still had to seek help, and still had to go through a resolution process. When teams measure success solely by containment rate, they miss a critical reality: managing case volume often hides the root causes of customer pain. The Illusion of a “Solved” Problem Kailey Maldonado, Support Leader at RETR, ran into this…