Ticket Deflection: Your Guide to Self-Service

As per Social Stamina, 64% of customers expect a reply within an hour of posting on Twitter, and 85% expect a company to respond within six hours. [1]

While this trend in customer expectations applies to almost all industries across the board, certain businesses – such as e-commerce apps – are witnessing an all-time high in traffic. Most companies may be crowded with service-related concerns, drowning customer support agents in an ever-increasing volume of tickets. Chances are that some of your agents may also plan their vacation around the same time, leaving your customers and the rest of the support team with several unresolved queries. This is where ticket deflection comes in handy. Read this guide to explore:

 

What is ticket deflection?

Ticket deflection is the process of redirecting customers to relevant answers on self-service portals using chatbots, forums, knowledge base, or FAQ pages to resolve support tickets at the earliest. Ticket deflection helps ensure that your customer support team has fewer tickets to handle, reducing support costs and delivering a better customer experience.

 

How do you measure ticket deflection?

Ticket deflection is measured using the ticket deflection ratio or the deflection rate.

The ticket deflection ratio is calculated as the number of views of the posts on your self-service portal divided by the number of tickets.

This metric helps support teams track your self-service support’s success by analyzing if your customers can use given resources effectively. The higher the ticket deflection ratio, the better. This suggests that you have succeeded in helping your customers solve their problems without the need to reach out to your support teams.

 

How can you set up effective ticket deflection?

Ticket deflection is a great way to reduce incoming customer requests, especially if they are frequently asked questions. You can set up an automation rule to deflect tickets as soon as they are created. If you are a Freshdesk user, you can configure your Freshdesk account to auto-suggest solution articles from your knowledge base based on the ticket subject or keywords entered by the customer.

If you are new to ticket deflection, here are different ways to deflect your ticket. 

1. Chatbots 

When your customers interact with a chatbot, it can easily resolve queries that have been answered on your knowledge base. Here are the different ways you can use chatbots for ticket deflection:

  • Gather customer information: You can use a chatbot to gather preliminary customer information before connecting them to an agent. This will shorten the wait times for customers and make improve the efficiency of customer support agents.
  • Resolve customer queries: You can chatbots that use Natural Language Processing so that your customers feel like they are talking to an actual human being. Every customer helped by a chatbot is one less customer to be attended to by your customer service team. This frees your team to focus on complex customer issues that need human intervention.
  • Enable simple transactions: If most of your customer service requests are transactional, you can deploy dynamic rule-based bots to gather customer information, find the right tickets and close the loop. Logistics vendors and e-commerce portals may use these chatbots because the majority of their queries are around tracking their shipments, filing returns, or exchanging for their purchases.

2. Knowledge base for FAQs

You can use your knowledge base software to curate frequently asked questions and create and host self-help guides on your website, app, or knowledge base to help your customers find answers to their problems without reaching out to support agents. Customer demands evolve over time. Your customer service team needs to ensure that your knowledge base is periodically updated with the latest resources and answers to new questions. Your knowledge base can include:

  • Documentation for products/services offered
  • Answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs)
  • Step-by-step instructions to troubleshoot common issues
  • In-depth how-to guides explaining the usage of your products or services
  • Company policies that customers should know about
  • Video tutorials and demos of product features
  • Onboarding resources for new customers

3. Community Forums

Community forums allow your customers to benefit from each other. When similar questions have been answered by customers on community forums, tickets can be deflected to the forum where your customer can find the right answers from fellow users. Some of these questions may be too specific for customer service teams to write detailed knowledge-base articles. But users who have been in a similar situation may understand the sentiments of the other users better and help them with an answer that resolves their issues.

Your team must keep tabs on the questions with the highest engagement so that they can write knowledge base articles about them. This will help build a user-friendly knowledge base that can be a one-stop solution for your customers.

Now that you understand what ticket deflection means and how you can deflect your tickets, let’s dive deeper into its benefits for your customers and business.

 

How does ticket deflection improve customer experience?

Ticket deflection happens when you encourage your customers to self-serve and find answers to their questions. Here are a few more ways ticket deflection benefits your customers and helps deliver enhanced customer experiences.

  1. Lower response times improve customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores
  2. Customers feel empowered and engaged while troubleshooting their problems using interactive self-service portals
  3. Customers feel in control of their journey with easy access to case studies, whitepapers, community forums, and answers to common questions from around the globe

Let’s dive deeper into how ticket deflection impacts ticket queues, the productivity of your customer support staff, and, eventually, your business.

ticket deflection MISA

 

Top 5 benefits of ticket deflection for your business

Ticket deflection empowers your customers as much as it contributes to agent productivity. Here’s how.

1. Lower support costs

The easiest way to use self-service portals as your first line of defense is by deploying a knowledge base software to track customer interactions using the added resources. Doing so will save on support costs because your agents will have to resolve only a fraction of the number of support tickets received. Meanwhile, other tickets get redirected to knowledge base articles and FAQ portals. Contact centers benefit through ticket deflection as they no longer need to hire more agents during peak seasons.

2. Increased agent satisfaction

According to the Deconstructing Delight report, 80% of customers said they want quicker company responses, but your customer support agents can handle only a certain number of tickets before they give in to burnout or churn. Ticket deflection helps improve agent satisfaction by encouraging customer self-service and reducing the workload on agents. This allows agents to focus on only critical or high-priority customer queries that need attention or customized solutions.

3. Resolve more support tickets 

You may be new to the market, adding new customers to your business, or have recently launched a new product/service. Your customers will always have questions. But that shouldn’t come in the way of solving issues easily. Ticket deflection allows you to keep up with your customers and solve as many customer support tickets as possible- some by your agents and others by customers with some help from your knowledge base and chatbots.

4. Growing pool of loyal customers

Customers value brands that deliver as promised and may go the extra mile to exceed customer expectations. Your support teams need to ensure queries are resolved quickly and efficiently, no matter how trivial the question may be. Ticket deflection ensures your customer gets an answer as soon as they search for one, be it from an agent or a pre-curated repository with troubleshooting guides, tutorials, and company resources available 24*7. This encourages customers to stay loyal to a brand.

 

Ticket deflection: The secret to doing more with less

Picture a customer who wants to upgrade to your new plan. He is looking for a detailed guide to help him make that transaction. He drops a quick in-app message to your support team to expedite this process, but this request turns into a ticket, adds to your existing ticket queue, and has to wait for an agent to be assigned. In this case, your customer satisfaction scores are bound to take a hit.

Now, imagine the same scenario where the moment this customer sends in a request to be assisted for an upgrade to the new plan, the in-app chatbot detected the nature of the request and instantly responded with the relevant link to the right knowledge base article. Not only does your customer follow the step-by-step tutorial to make that transaction instantly, he also walks away feeling empowered and satisfied with your customer support.

Ticket deflection is not a means to end all your support tickets. There will always be questions that need more attention, time, and unique solutions. Ticket deflection is the first step to empowering proactive customer support teams to deliver effortless customer experiences.

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