Is IVR containment rate even a network metric?
I’m a network engineer, and my boss asked me to improve the ‘IVR containment rate’. I have no idea what that means. I handle QoS, bandwidth, and traceroutes. Is this something I should care about, or is it an Architect/routing problem?
I keep hearing about ‘flow milestones’ as a way to track containment, but I can’t find where to set them up.
Is a milestone the same as a ‘Transfer to ACD’ block? If a caller reaches the transfer block, does that mean they were NOT contained? I’m confused about the terminology.
If you are tracking containment by monitoring the flow exit points, make sure your screen recording data aligns.
We discovered that agents were manually disconnecting calls right after receiving them from the IVR, which the system logged as ‘agent handled’ rather than ‘IVR contained’. The screen recordings proved the agents were immediately hanging up, which inflated our containment metrics.
From a voice analysis perspective, you can use the audio stream to measure true containment.
If the caller reaches the IVR self-service and completes the transaction (e.g., pays a bill), the audio pattern will show DTMF input followed by a confirmation prompt followed by a caller-initiated disconnect. If the caller presses ‘0’ to reach an agent, the audio pattern is distinctly different. You can train a simple classifier on these patterns to validate your flow milestone data.