How we count a resolution

Why this page exists

Nobody in this category audits their own resolution numbers. They are vendor-reported, and the definitions sit behind the marketing rather than in front of it.

The consequences are documented. On Intercom's own community forum, a customer reviewed four weeks of conversations: 40 involved Fin, 16 were billed as resolutions, and on the customer's own review 9 of those 16 had not been resolved by Fin at all. In an earlier thread, the same customer described being billed whenever the team stepped in before a customer asked for a person, and an Intercom support engineer agreed that stepping in "should be seen as good judgment, not something to be penalized". Intercom later said it was considering changes to how it measures resolutions. Its resolution definition is unchanged today, and since early 2026 it has also billed some hand-offs to a human as outcomes.

We are not immune to that incentive. We are exposed to it more directly than most, because we bill per resolution. A loose definition pays us more. Saying we are honest does nothing about that; publishing the definition, dating it, and showing you how to check it does something about it. That is what this page is.

What counts

All four conditions have to hold. "Finished on its own" excludes anything a colleague touched. "Actually answered" excludes acknowledgements and partial replies. The customer, not Varley, is the one whose question has to be dealt with. And "shows its working" means the sources it read and the steps it took are on the record, which is what makes the rest of this page checkable rather than merely stated.

The denominator, stated

When we publish a resolution rate, the denominator is every conversation Varley was given, including the ones it handed off and the ones it got wrong. Not conversations filtered to those judged eligible, in-scope, or answerable after the fact. Choosing the denominator after seeing the results is the most common way a resolution rate is inflated, and it is invisible in the headline number.

What marks the moment

A resolution is counted only where there is positive evidence the customer's issue was dealt with. In practice that means one of two things: the customer said so, or Varley completed an action that settles the request and can be checked afterwards, such as a refund issued or a subscription cancelled.

Silence never counts, however long it runs and however warm the last message was. And Varley does not grade its own work: the agent's own opinion that it did well is not evidence and is never the trigger. Those two mechanisms, inferred agreement and self-assessment, are what produce the resolution rates you see advertised elsewhere. Neither is available to us, by design rather than by restraint.

What does not count

None of the following is billed, ever.

Assumed resolutions

An assumed resolution is a conversation counted as resolved because the customer stopped replying, rather than because anything was confirmed. Several vendors bill for them once a silence window passes, commonly 24 hours. It is the largest single source of overcounting in AI support billing, and it is invisible on an invoice: the line item looks identical to a real resolution.

Varley does not count assumed resolutions and does not bill them. It is the first exclusion below because it is the one most likely to be costing you money somewhere else.

• A conversation that goes quiet Silence is not agreement. A customer who stops replying may have been helped, may have given up, or may have gone somewhere else. Vendors who count silence after a fixed window call it an assumed resolution. We do not count it at all.
• Anything a human on your team joins At any point, for any reason, however late. If a colleague typed into the conversation, it is not ours to bill.
• A partial answer Two questions asked, one answered, is not a resolution. It is half a resolution, and there is no such line on the invoice.
• Greetings, thanks and acknowledgements "Thanks, that's great" is a reply to a resolution, not a second one. Out-of-office replies and delivery receipts are not conversations.
• An unanswered clarifying question If Varley asked what the customer meant and never heard back, nothing was resolved.
• Internal machinery Document look-ups, tool calls, API requests, retries, re-reads of your knowledge base, and any internal step Varley takes to think. You are billed for outcomes, not for the work behind them. Several vendors meter these separately; we do not meter them at all. This page covers Agent mode, where Varley works a conversation on its own. Work Varley does alongside your team, such as drafting a reply or answering a teammate's question, is priced per action on the published price list. It is never billed as a resolution, and a resolution is never also billed for the actions inside it.
• Conversations Varley declines If it refuses, flags something out of bounds, or stops because it is not confident, that is the system working. It is not billable.
• Testing Anything in a sandbox, and anything during onboarding before you have switched Agent mode on for real traffic.

Hand-offs are free

The reasoning is an incentive, not a courtesy. An AI whose vendor is paid for escalating has a reason to escalate too readily; one that is paid only for resolutions has a reason to avoid escalating when it should. Making hand-offs free removes the bill from the decision entirely, so the only thing left to optimise is whether a human is genuinely needed.

This is also the line most competitors cannot copy without repricing. At least one bills a credit whether a conversation ends "resolved, routed, or escalated", which means the customer pays at the exact moment the product fails.

Reopened conversations

A customer writes back four days later about the same problem. Their issue was not resolved, but you have already been billed for it. This is the single most common place a per-resolution bill quietly overcounts, and almost nobody publishes their answer to it.

Not a discount on the second attempt. The first charge comes off, because it was taken for something that turned out not to have happened.

Thirty days rather than seven or fourteen, because a short window is convenient for us and worse for you, and this is not a page where we get to choose that way round. Whether it counts as the same issue is a judgement, so it is recorded in your log with the reason attached and you can disagree with it.

How to check our maths

Everything above is a claim until you test it. Here is the test, and we would rather you ran it than took our word.

That sentence is less impressive than describing a button, and it is the true one. A self-serve log is the right answer and it is not built. Until it is, the list is manual and you get it by asking, as often as you like. The conversations themselves are already sitting in your own inbox, so the check never depends on trusting our copy of them.

1. Ask us for your resolution listOne email to support@dragapp.com. You get every billed resolution for the period, each with the conversation it refers to and the date it was counted.
2. Take a random sample of 40Forty is enough to catch a systematic problem. Do not let us choose which forty.
3. Read them and mark each oneResolved, not resolved, or ambiguous, by your judgement rather than ours. Count ambiguous as not resolved.
4. Compare with what we billedThe two numbers should match. If they do not, the gap is the size of the problem.
5. Tell us, and we correct itWe credit the difference on your next invoice. If the cause was how we count rather than a one-off, the fix is written into the changelog at the bottom of this page, where everyone can see what changed and when.

Questions

Changelog

Every change to this definition is listed here, oldest at the bottom. If a change would increase what you pay, we will tell you at least 30 days before it takes effect, and any conversation already open on that date is counted under the old version.

23 Sep 2026

Text corrections, no change to the definition or the version. "Why this page exists" described two Intercom Community threads as one and gave a figure from a reply rather than the customer's own count; it now cites both threads and the customer's figure, 9 of 16. "Internal machinery" now says that per-action prices on the price list cover work done alongside your team, not Agent mode.

23 Sep 2026

Version 1.1, effective 28 September 2026. The price per resolution is $0.50, from $0.49, so it matches the one price list Varley uses everywhere. The definition itself is unchanged: nothing counts now that did not count before.

7 Sep 2026

Version 1.0. First published.