Ticket Deflection: Benefits and Examples
If you’ve ever maintained a help desk for employees, customers, or clients, you probably know what it’s like to receive a high number of support tickets.
While this situation is understandable, repeatedly addressing support tickets consumes the valuable time of the customer support team and adds to the organization’s payroll expenses. The solution to this issue is known as ticket deflection. Now, let’s explore what ticket deflection is.
Ticket Deflection Meaning
Ticket deflection refers to strategies or tools used in customer service to reduce the number of customer support tickets by providing self-help options like FAQs, knowledge bases, automated chatbots, or community forums.
This allows customers to find answers to their queries without needing direct assistance from a support agent. For instance, when you implement ticket deflection, you’ll reduce the volume of tickets your team has to field in two ways.
First: offering a customer self-service portal will help people find answers on their own.
Second: when someone does submit a ticket with a simple answer, you can provide automated answers from your knowledge base.
It’s easy to see how having a knowledge base will encourage your customers, clients, or employees to search for answers on their own rather than submit tickets for everything. Here is where enterprise search capabilities came to help in large companies. On the other hand, automation is a little more involved but fully customizable to your business.
Support Ticket Deflection Example
Let’s say you run a company selling athletic shoes and you get a slew of support tickets asking how your shoe sizing compares to other brands. This is a common way customers figure out what size to buy since size charts don’t account for the overall fit and feel of a shoe. However, it’s a waste of time for your support team to constantly answer these tickets.
In this case, whenever someone submits a ticket asking how your shoes fit compared to other brands, you can “deflect” the ticket by referring them to an article in your knowledge base.
Why Ticket Deflection Supports Your Business
Ticket deflection supports an efficient customer support system, which ultimately supports your bottom line. Providing outstanding customer service is critical. When your customers feel taken care of, they’re more likely to continue doing business with you and refer you to others.
The key to making customers happy and feel taken care of is providing top-notch customer service, but that doesn’t mean you need to personally answer every question from every customer. In fact, trying to answer every customer personally tends to lower the quality of support. Support staff will get tired of answering the same questions over and over, and they’ll have less time for more pressing issues.
On the other hand, when your support team isn’t tied up managing simple or redundant requests, they’re free to work on more complex issues your customers are having. All customer support requests are important, but they don’t always require personal support.
Even when leveraging ticket triage systems or universal bots, ticket deflections can further reduce unnecessary workload on your system. Using ticket deflection ensures that your team is available to tackle the critical issues personally, while still providing excellent support and resolution to those asking the redundant (or simple) questions.
How to Implement Support Ticket Deflection in Your Business
If you want to start deflecting tickets, you’ll need to begin with creating a solid knowledge base. You need a database full of content you can deliver to people who:
- Find your knowledge base and explore on your own
- Interact with your AI chatbot
- Open tickets
Developing an extensive, in-depth knowledge base will make it easier to answer questions before they become support tickets. The better you can answer questions in your articles, the fewer tickets you’ll receive. If your knowledge base content doesn’t answer anyone’s questions fully, they’ll still open a ticket.
1. Make a List of Common Questions
The easiest way to start creating your knowledge base is to make a list of the most common questions people ask through your IT helpdesk chatbot and/or help desk ticketing system. Once you have a list of common questions, start making a list of issues that are less common, but still experienced by multiple people. This list can include anything, for example:
- SaaS bugs or glitches encountered by users
- Misunderstandings that need some clarity
- A walkthrough of common customizations people want to implement
- How to use your product or service
You can also list questions that aren’t common because if just one or two people have experienced an issue, chances are, more people have and others will in the future.
2. Create Articles Answering Each Question
Once you have a list of questions and issues that people might need to resolve, create an in-depth knowledge base article answering each question or addressing each issue.
Keep in mind that your knowledge base articles will always be a work in progress, and should be updated each time you find a better way to explain something. Better explanations will come to you over time as your support staff develop more effective ways to explain solutions.
3. Choose Your Knowledge Base Software
When you create your knowledge base, be sure to use specific knowledge base software instead of constructing it as a collection of basic web pages. You’ll want to tag each entry so the system will dynamically display related articles in case people need to explore further answers.
4. Setup Your Automation
Once you have your knowledge base full of content, it’s time to set up your help desk automation triggers.
In this stage, you’ll program your help desk software to recommend the right articles based on keywords and phrases. For example, if a support request contains the phrase “reset password,” program your software to send the user to your knowledge base article walking them through a password reset.
This stage of the process will take the most time because you’ll need to really think about which keywords and phrases should trigger automated article suggestions. However, you can go over old customer support tickets and emails to find ideas.
Ready to Deflect Support tickets? We’ve Got What You Need
Time is money, and ticket deflection will help you save both. Even if you already use help desk software, if you aren’t deflecting tickets, you’re losing revenue.
If you’re ready to implement ticket deflection within your business, we have what you need. Our AI-powered digital help desk solution is perfect for businesses that need to streamline support requests and use automated tools to improve their ticket deflection ratios while keeping customers engaged with a self-service knowledge base. Our AI Customer Service software can help you improve your customer service KPIs and achieve a 70% ticket reduction with a conversational AI platform, up to 85% customer satisfaction score (CSAT), and a 90% MTTR reduction by automating tasks and actions.
The Aisera service experience (AISX) platform is exactly what you need to provide amazing customer experiences and drive higher revenue. See Aisera in action by scheduling an AI demo today!