Deflection rate
Deflection rate is the most overstated number in support automation, almost always by accident.
Why it matters
It is the number used to justify the investment, and the common calculation — bot conversations divided by total contacts — assumes every conversation would otherwise have been a ticket. Most would not.
- Deflection claimed as a percentage of all bot conversations
- No baseline recorded before the assistant launched
- Reported deflection with no corresponding fall in ticket volume
Why the easy calculation inflates
An assistant invites questions that would never have become tickets. People will ask a bot something they would not compose an email about, so counting those as deflected tickets measures the assistant's popularity rather than its effect.
The honest version
Compare normalised ticket volume before and after — tickets per hundred active customers, or per thousand sessions. Normalising matters because a growing business would have had more tickets regardless.
Baseline first
Without a before, any after is unfalsifiable.
Normalise
Raw counts confound growth with effect.
Read it with satisfaction
Falling tickets with falling satisfaction is not deflection, it is attrition. The two numbers only mean something together.
Common questions
- How long before deflection is measurable?
- Several weeks at minimum. Weekly ticket volume is noisy and the first fortnight after launch is distorted by novelty.
- Is high deflection always good?
- Only if satisfaction holds. Deflection achieved by making contact difficult shows up later as churn, which is a far more expensive number.
From the blog
All posts- MeasuringResolution rate vs deflection: stop mixing the twoResolution and deflection answer different questions. Mixing them inflates the result and hides whether customers actually got what they needed.Read
- MeasuringHow to baseline ticket volume before you launch a botRecord normalised ticket volume for several weeks before launch. Skip the baseline and you will never know whether the bot displaced work or only looked busy.Read
- EvaluatingWhy answer rate is a vendor metric, not a buyer metricAnswer rate is trivially improved by being less careful. Here is what the number actually measures — and what to read instead when you evaluate vendors.Read
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