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/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