AI support agent's 78% close rate was inflated: repeat tickets pushed cost per task up 31%

Fuzzy-Teaching7112 · reddit · 2026-10-14

A support team lead found their AI agent's ROI was overstated once repeat tickets were counted.

The agent closed 78% of tickets with an 11% reopen rate, and finance was happy.
But many customers open a new ticket (sometimes from a different email) instead of reopening the old one — none of which counted against the agent. Matching new tickets to closed ones by customer + order number within 7 days, plus the agent's intent tags, revealed nearly all were the same problem returning.
That added another 13% of "closed" tickets that weren't solved — roughly a quarter of what the agent closed still needed a human. Cost per successful task rose from $0.54 to $0.71, driven mostly by uncounted human redos, not tokens.
Spend per run comes from Pointfive (each call tagged by workflow); tickets live in Zendesk and the join query reruns monthly.

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