METRICS
BY MIKI FURMAN, CALL FORCE GLOBAL
ILLUSTRATION PROVIDED BY ADOBE STOCK
WHEN THE AUDIENCE IS NOT HUMAN WHY TRADITIONAL DEFLECTION METRICS
Consider these increasingly common occurrences throughout contact centers:
• An AI assistant reads your knowledge base on a customer ' s behalf, answers them, and never opens a ticket. Your deflection rate improves.
• An agent-shaped bot fills in your web form. Your speed-to-lead starts timing how fast you called a robot back.
Neither event involved a person. Both were counted. And somewhere a budget or a headcount plan rides on the count.
24 CONTACT CENTER PIPELINE
CAN ' T BE TRUSTED.
HOW AI DISTORTS METRICS
That is the whole problem, and it reaches further into your reporting than most people expect.
• Your cost per contact improves when contact volume rises. If a share of that volume is AI bot software rather than customers, the number gets better while the cost of serving an actual person gets worse. You will carry that improving number into a budget meeting and defend it.
• Your chatbot containment counts a session that ended without escala- tion. An AI summarizer walking your chat flow ends exactly the way a satisfied customer does.
• Your first contact resolution( FCR) assumes there was a first contact. The moment that contact was a script, the metric is describing something that did not happen.