Do You Know the Types of Case Deflection?
Case deflection is when customers are able to find their own answers to issues on your website or your platform by using self-service without having to contact your customer support team. A higher case deflection rate means more people are finding answers to their questions due to an effective knowledge management system. As a result, your customer support team spends less time helping customers with issues that could have been solved via self-service and more time helping customers with more complex issues. But what are the types of case deflection and how do they each work?
The two types of case deflection are explicit and implicit. Explicit case deflection is more obvious and easier to measure. It’s when a customer starts to create a help ticket, then abandons the page meaning they’ve found the answer on their own. Implicit is a little broader–it’s anything that implies that a case was deflected, and it happens without a customer landing on a ‘create a ticket’ page. It involves certain pageviews of helpful self-service content or when a customer rates self-service as helpful.
Learn more about identifying the type of case deflection by downloading the infographic.
In short, no, case deflection and self-service are not the same thing, but they are closely related. Case deflection refers to when a ticket or customer case is avoided because the customer uses a self-service channel, like a FAQ page or knowledge base, rather than a customer support agent. The goal of case deflection is to reduce the workload of customer support agents and improve efficiency by enabling customers to find answers to their questions on their own. Self-service, however, refers to any customer service solution that allows customers to find information or resolve issues on their own (a website, app, chatbot, etc). In summary, case deflection is the avoidance of a customer contacting support due to successful self-service content, but self-service encompasses a wider range of customer service solutions.
Measuring case deflection involves gathering and analyzing customer service data to determine the percentage of inquiries or issues that were successfully resolved through self-service channels rather than requiring assistance from a customer support agent. This involves tracking the number of users that landed on a case creation or ticket creation page and didn’t complete it, as well as tracking implicit deflection. Implicit deflection is harder to measure, but it can be measured by looking at self-service content feedback – for example when a customer rates a piece of self-service content 5 out of 5 or indicates that “yes, this was helpful” when prompted.
Increasing case deflection is all about optimizing your knowledge management system and the customer self-service experience. It's important to ensure that your self-service platforms are easy to use, intuitive, and provide accurate and up-to-date information. If a self-service platform has all the right info but is clunky and hard to navigate, it likely won’t help increase case deflection. Companies can also use AI-powered tools to increase case deflection. One way is by using chatbots to assist customers with their inquiries and direct them to self-service resources. Another way is to use AI to provide more personalized, relevant results and utilize machine learning to produce better results based on continual customer data.
