---
title: "Resolution rate"
canonical: https://replypen.com/glossary/resolution-rate
description: "A resolution rate is the share of customer conversations a support tool counts as resolved, often without a person getting involved."
question: "What is a resolution rate, and why can it mislead?"
author: "ReplyPen team"
published: 2026-09-30
operator: ProBackup BV (Hasselt, Belgium)
---

# What is a resolution rate, and why can it mislead?

A resolution rate is the share of customer conversations a support tool counts as resolved, often without a person getting involved. It sounds like a quality score, but each vendor defines "resolved" its own way, and many count a conversation as resolved when the customer simply did not write back.

Common definitions include: the customer did not reply within a set time, the customer clicked "this
helped", or the conversation closed without being handed to a person. Each of these can be true while
the customer's problem is not solved.

## Why it matters

A customer who got a wrong answer and gave up looks exactly like a satisfied one in most resolution
counts. Because the vendor sets the definition and does the counting, two tools' rates cannot be
compared, and neither can be checked from your side. For a small business this matters when the
rate is used to justify switching off human review, or when pricing is charged per resolution.

A more checkable question is what happened to each reply: did a person send it unchanged, edit it,
or throw it away? That is the [sent-unchanged rate](https://replypen.com/glossary/sent-unchanged-rate.md).

## An example

A chat tool reports that it resolved most conversations last month. A look at the transcripts shows
many ended after an answer that did not fit, with the customer later writing to the email inbox
instead.

In detail: [why AI resolution-rate claims mislead small businesses](https://replypen.com/blog/why-resolution-rate-claims-mislead.md).

## Related

- [Sent-unchanged rate](https://replypen.com/glossary/sent-unchanged-rate.md): The sent-unchanged rate is the share of AI-written drafts sent to customers exactly as written, without a single edit.
- [Edit rate](https://replypen.com/glossary/edit-rate.md): Edit rate is the share of AI-written drafts that a person changed before sending.
- [First response time](https://replypen.com/glossary/first-response-time.md): First response time is how long a customer waits between sending an email and getting the first reply from a person at your business.