Containment is up. Repeat contacts are up. Trust is leaking — and the metrics you're watching aren't designed to show it.
As a customer, I can forgive a delay or a mistake. What’s harder to forgive is feeling trapped in a loop when I need help, especially when it’s obvious the system is trying to save money at my expense.
That tension is showing up across the customer experience: companies are chasing containment and deflection gains to reduce cost per contact, but in the process, many are eroding the trust that keeps customers loyal.
In a recent interview with CX Today, Jeremy Puent, Principal Solution Architect at Amazon Connect, and Tony Shen, Senior Product Manager at Amazon Connect, argued that containment metrics are often treated like a north star when they should be treated like a secondary signal.
The real priority, Puent said, is building automation that earns trust by reducing customer effort scores, improving outcomes, and keeping a clear path to human help.
"Containment and deflection are about driving those costs down. The most expensive part of that calculation is the human resource."
Why Leaders Became Obsessed With Containment In The First Place
Puent points to a familiar board-level fixation: cost per contact. In many industries, leaders can recite unit economics instantly, and the Customer Support Operations are often managed the same way. If a customer can be “contained” in an IVR or routed into a chat flow where agents handle multiple conversations at once, the math looks better.
The problem is what that math can hide.
Containment can go up while customers are working harder to get answers. Deflection can rise while repeat contacts increase. And dashboards can look “green” while trust is quietly draining away.
Puent shared an internal framing used on Amazon’s retail side that illustrates the mindset shift: treat customer contacts as signals that something broke upstream.
"At Amazon.com on the retail side, we call a customer contact a defect, and we focus on defect elimination."
How Containment Metrics Undermine Trust
Trust is not lost because an AI agent exists. Trust is lost when automation makes customers feel powerless.
Puent described the difference between an AI agent that helps and an AI agent that harms: recognition, context, and escalation. If the system knows who is calling, why they are calling, and can quickly confirm the relevant issue, automation can be a trust builder. If it cannot, it becomes friction.
He offered a simple scenario. A delivery is delayed due to a blizzard. A good customer experience anticipates the reason for the call and confirms it quickly, while still letting the customer reach a person if needed.
A bad experience repeats questions, forces a cheaper channel, and blocks escalation.
"If you create a bad experience, you don’t give me a path to get to a human being if I still feel like I need one… You’re going to create frustration and drive me away. That erodes trust."
In practice, the trust-killers are familiar to any CX leader reviewing escalation complaints: Customers repeating information. The AI agent asking for details the customer does not have. A “containment at all costs” flow that delays human help. A channel strategy that feels like avoidance, not service.
What To Measure Instead If Trust Is The Goal
Shen’s argument is not that containment should be ignored. It’s that containment alone is a misleading headline.
He recommends customer experience measures as the real north star, with containment tracked alongside them to ensure automation is not improving efficiency by damaging outcomes.
"Containment alone is not the right North Star."
For teams trying to operationalize trust, Shen pointed to measurable indicators that can move trust from a subjective debate to something teams can manage with evidence. That includes whether customers actually accomplish what they came for, and whether AI responses are grounded in the right sources.
The downstream costs are quantifiable: repeat contacts that double cost per resolution; CSAT drops of even 5-10 points that research links to measurable churn acceleration; and customers lost to competitors at acquisition costs 5-25x higher than what retention would have required. Trust isn't a soft metric, it's a leading indicator of lifetime value. When you let containment erode trust, you're not saving money. You're trading pennies for dollars.
