Onboarding new customers as your business grows is as exciting as it gets. However, with an expanding customer base comes a flurry of support requests. As requests soar, it can often become tricky to maintain the excellent level of support that attracted your customers in the first place.
When organizations fumble with delivering proper customer support due to increasing ticket volumes, the result is often poor customer experience, increased churn rates, and, ultimately, lost revenue.
With ticket deflection strategies, you can redirect customers to AI-powered chatbots and self-service options instead of having them go back and forth with support agents.
Ultimately, this will reduce the number of support tickets, effectively freeing up your team to handle more complex issues.
What is ticket deflection?
Ticket deflection is a customer service strategy where businesses use self-service tools, like AI chatbots, to reduce support tickets by allowing customers to quickly resolve issues on their own. This approach minimizes wait times, boosts response efficiency, and enhances overall customer satisfaction.
How ticket deflection works
The basis of ticket deflection lies in offering customers the answers they are looking for without creating a new ticket for each query. Here’s an example of how this works:
A customer wants to know when their order is getting delivered. Without ticket deflection, they would likely create a support ticket by chatting with a live agent, who would manually check the order fulfillment system to respond with the date.
With ticket deflection, the customer initiates the conversation with an AI chatbot that instantly accesses the database and delivers the information in seconds. This way, the customer receives the answer they need in a matter of seconds, and the agent’s time remains free for other complex tasks.
Benefits of ticket deflection
Ticket deflection allows customers to resolve their queries through a combination of self-service options and AI-based automation.
Here’s how AI-powered ticket deflection can work wonders for you:
1. Improved customer experience
Swift and accurate responses to queries lie at the heart of an excellent customer experience. Ticket deflection meets the demand for quick responses by providing instant solutions through sophisticated tools such as AI-powered chatbots, comprehensive FAQ pages, and informative knowledge bases.
These empower customers to self-serve and find solutions quickly without the involvement of a human agent. Also, automated support systems, unlike live agents, are available round the clock. With 24*365 support, customers need not wait for resolution and can get the help they need, right when they need it.
2. Consistent service
When interacting with human agents, customers may not always receive consistent service, as the quality of responses may vary from agent to agent.
With AI in customer support automation, you can standardize all responses your customers receive. Advanced AI agents can also interpret customer intent, redirect them to the right place, and escalate when necessary, making for a consistently smooth support experience.
3. Scalability
Chatbots and other self-service options can take on a higher number of customer queries and handle multiple queries simultaneously. With AI-enabled ticket deflection, you can cater to increasing customer demand without having to proportionally scale the support team.
4. Increased revenue
AI-driven support ticket resolution eliminates the need for keeping a large support staff on the payroll, ultimately reducing costs for the organization.
Additionally, AI ticket deflection reduces churn rates through quick resolution, paving the way for the kind of customer loyalty that promises sustained revenue.
10 proven strategies to improve ticket deflection
Ultimately, the goal of ticket deflection is to cut down the number of support tickets by empowering customers to find solutions without depending on agents.
While there is no definitive formula for ticket deflection, there are many tactics you can deploy to improve ticket deflection rates.
1. Employ advanced chatbots
AI-powered chatbots use Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to deliver real-time, personalized responses. They understand complex queries, analyze intent and sentiment, and handle a large share of L1 support—significantly reducing ticket volume.
DevRev takes it a step further by pairing AI agents with smart in-app experiences and user insights. From helping users fix issues on their own to showing teams exactly where customers struggle, it creates a smoother, more supportive journey for everyone.
2. Integrate the chatbot with your systems
The quality of responses that your chatbot provides depends on the quality of data you feed it with. Set up your chatbots in a way that they can draw information from all the necessary sources, like your knowledge bases and other necessary documents.
Integrating various systems within your organization, such as your CRM tools, billing systems, and helpdesks creates a larger repository of information your chatbots can draw from.
This reduces the need for escalations and improves ticket deflection as your chatbot can now independently answer a broader range of questions.
3. Embrace AI
AI goes way beyond just simply powering your chatbots. When you bring an AI-based customer support solution into the mix, you also improve your knowledge base and FAQ sections.
DevRev takes this a step further by integrating deep neural conversational AI, RAG, semantic search, and proactive nudges. Its new article creation and article analytics dashboard make it easier to generate and track helpful content. These tools deliver personalized, real-time support empowering users to resolve issues on their own.
4. Build a proactive feedback loop
Chatbots do more than just deliver quick answers—they also gather valuable feedback and anticipate customer needs. By asking simple follow-up questions like “Did that solve your issue?”, they help measure effectiveness in real time.
These insights let you fine-tune performance, trigger timely nudges, and proactively surface solutions—improving your ticket deflection strategy with every interaction.
5. Create a detailed FAQ page
An FAQ page is a great way to answer simple and repetitive questions. To get started, you’d want to identify the most common questions your customers ask. You can do this by collaborating with your support agents to understand the type of questions they encounter most frequently.
Advanced chatbots offer analytics on FAQ categories, recurring issues, and customer intent, helping you refine content. Enhance the experience further by adding videos and screenshots to improve user understanding.
6. Comprehensive knowledge bases
A knowledge base is a collection of documents designed to help customers solve problems on their own. A good knowledge base features updated information organized into well-defined categories.
A great knowledge base goes beyond just written content—it should include a mix of formats like documentation, policies, how-to guides, and even video tutorials. Plus, it should also be easy to navigate with a search bar and AI-powered suggestions to quickly guide customers to the right resources.
7. Support multiple channels
Different customers choose to interact with your business through different channels. This means simply applying a chatbot to your website may not meet customer’s demands entirely.
Your AI-powered chatbot must be able to offer omni-channel support and meet customer needs whether they contact you via your website, social media channels or email. This way, you can deflect tickets coming in from all directions and escalate only those that need human interaction.
8. User-generated content
Many customers prefer self-service over interacting with an agent. User generated content resources like community forums serve these customers when they aren’t able to find the answers they need in the FAQ sections.
On community forums, customers can troubleshoot the issues they are facing and also share solutions with other users. These forums can also be a great resource for your business to identify issues, gather product ideas and collect feedback.
9. Offer multilingual support
If your customers are located internationally, offering multilingual support resources can greatly improve customer experience as well as ticket deflection.
By offering multilingual chatbot support and knowledge bases, you can aid customers in using their native language to find quick answers. Again, this does away with the need to create a ticket to speak with an agent.
10. Personalize content
When customers are able to find exactly what they need, it reduces the likelihood of them submitting a ticket. Personalizing chatbot responses or offering AI-powered suggestions to customers can help them get the answers they are looking for. Intent-aware chatbots can quickly understand exactly what the customer needs and offer them just that.
For example, if a customer is trying to understand the difference between specific products, an intelligent AI-powered chatbot can identify the requirement and present differences between products in an easy-to-read format, therefore giving a personalized, specific and helpful response.
Master ticket deflection with DevRev
AI-based automation and chatbots are key players in effective ticket deflection. They take on a large portion of support queries, allowing your customer support team to focus on complex issues that need human interaction.
To make the most of AI in your ticket deflection efforts, you need an AI-native solution like DevRev. DevRev automates routine tasks, offers advanced data analytics and brings together customer support, product development, and CRM systems onto one platform.
DevRev’s AI-powered chatbot PLuG can change the way you interact with customers by providing intelligent responses to their queries, understanding their intent and analyzing their sentiment. PLuG is powered by Turing AI which uses LLM and machine learning to scrape your website, knowledge base and other resources to offer accurate responses quickly. With PLuG taking over basic support queries, your team can focus on higher-level issues.
On the backend of DevRev Support platform, you get detailed analytics, AI-powered insights and suggestions to improve your customer service and ticket deflection efforts. DevRev can also improve user observability to analyze user behavior on your website to identify points where customers get stuck.
Ready to expertly deflect tickets and reduce the load on your customer service team? Book a demo with DevRev today!
