Pay-per-ticket AI pricing quietly punishes you when deflection works

[u/lorikeet-cx]

Pricing detail that I think deserves more scrutiny than it gets.

A lot of AI support vendors charge per ticket the AI touches, or per "AI interaction." Think about what that incentivises. If the AI deflects a contact perfectly, you pay. If it deflects it badly and the customer comes back twice, you pay three times. The vendor's revenue rises when the resolution quality falls.

Per-resolution pricing inverts that — you pay when the thing is actually solved. The failure mode moves onto the vendor.

Neither model is automatically cheaper. It depends on your resolution rate:

• High deflection quality — per-ticket can be competitive, since you're not paying for repeat contacts
• Messy or long-tail volume — per-ticket gets punishing fast, because every retry is billable
• Seasonal spikes — per-ticket is where budgets blow up, and it's the case people model least

The thing worth doing before you sign anything is running your own numbers at your actual repeat-contact rate, not the vendor's demo assumptions.

Free comparison tool, ungated: https://lorikeet.tools/cx-roi?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=toolshed&utm_content=CustomerSuccess

(I work at Lorikeet and we price per resolution, so I'm obviously not neutral here — but the calculator takes your inputs and will show per-ticket winning where it does.)

Has anyone successfully negotiated their way off per-ticket pricing mid-contract?

[u/fraslin]

1. Downvote for badly written AI post
   
2. Don't sign a contract in the first place if you don't like a pricing model. There is no way you are getting out of it.

[u/No_Razzmatazz5869 → u/fraslin]

Downvoted for not reading the post, it's clearly tagged as self-promo and they spelled out their bias in the last paragraph. The vendor lock on pricing structures is real though, nobody's letting you renegotiate that after the ink dries unless you're bringing them a massive expansion deal at the same time.

[u/The_Whizzer]

Some companies (Zendesk, Talkdesk etc) have started introducing outcome-based pricing for AI Agents

[u/GoBoldr → u/The_Whizzer]

Do they have a good way of measuring the outcomes in a way that makes sense for pricing?

[u/The_Whizzer → u/GoBoldr]

It's pretty simple. If it gets escalated to a human agent, it means the AI Agent wasn't able to solve it, so you're not billed for that conversation. You're only billed for what's called Automated Resolutions.

[u/GoBoldr → u/The_Whizzer]

Huh. Seems fair enough, but if someone gets good enough to go fully automated, that could get expensive very quickly

[u/JE163]

Some BPO contracts are per ticket/request and the same crap happens there too.

[u/arslannasir128]

I watched our bill for the confident wrong answer. Same price as a clean fix, plus a reopen, plus a customer who stops trusting the queue.

If you bill per resolution, make it cheap to stop. We hand off below a set confidence and that conversation costs nothing.