What is ticket deflection?

Why it matters

Deflection is the metric most support tools lead with because it is easy to inflate. A chat that ends because the customer gave up counts as deflected. That makes deflection a poor proxy for value: it can rise while satisfaction falls. Support leaders who budget against deflection often discover the avoided tickets simply reappeared on another channel a day later.

What to know

• Deflection is measured as avoided contacts divided by total contact attempts, which means abandonment inflates it.
• A high deflection rate paired with a falling CSAT score usually means customers are giving up rather than getting answers.
• Deflection is channel-local. A customer deflected from chat who then emails has not been deflected at all, only moved.
• The honest version of the metric is resolution: the customer asked, got a correct answer, and did not come back.
• Vendors define deflection differently, so two quoted deflection rates are rarely comparable without reading the definition.

How to calculate it

An example

Example: a store shows a shipping FAQ before the chat box opens. Two hundred shoppers read it and close the window. All two hundred are recorded as deflected, even though some left because the FAQ did not answer their question and they gave up.

Common mistakes

• Treating deflection and resolution as the same number
• Counting abandoned chats as deflected contacts
• Optimising for deflection without watching repeat contact rate
• Comparing your deflection rate to a vendor benchmark computed differently

Questions