Best Tools for Deflecting Support Tickets with Self Service: Strategies
Ticket deflection involves offering customers the option to serve themselves through self-service tools such as chatbots, knowledge base and FAQs. This results in reduced tickets and enhanced customer satisfaction. In this blog, we’ll cover some of the best ticket deflection strategies, how to measure their performance and a few examples of successful ticket deflection.
What to take away from this?
Ticket deflection strategies such as knowledge base, chatbots, digital adoption platforms, and community forums enable effective ticket deflection by allowing customers to serve themselves, thereby reducing support tickets and enhancing customer satisfaction. Self-service portals act as digital centers where users can easily access any relevant information about a company from a single place, all on their own. Customers can either solve their queries through these options or can ask a real customer support agent to do it for them, which results in a lower backlog and an easier to manage load for support teams.
Ticket deflection strategies can be measured by deflection rates, the number of customers engaging with various self-service content, and chatbot success rates. These key features and metrics can be used to evaluate performance and make improvements.
Some of the common pitfalls when implementing ticket deflection strategies include avoiding customer frustration, striking a balance between automation and human interaction, and constant tracking of metrics to ensure the ticket deflection strategy and customer satisfaction succeeds.
Introduction
Customer satisfaction is at the heart of every successful business. Every organization adopts various measures to provide top-notch customer support to their clients. In this ever-changing domain, comes the need for ticket deflection strategies, as a valuable tool that facilitates effective support, enhanced customer satisfaction and optimal resource utilization. Ticket deflection strategies are designed to help customers resolve common customer issues independently, reducing the need for direct support. Updating customers about the status of a ticket or any important changes that occur on them reduces the necessity for them to keep contacting support, repetitively, and helps increase customer satisfaction.
It is a win-win strategy where the business not only supports an efficient customer support system but also saves on valuable resources and helps improve the bottom-line.
What is Ticket Deflection?
Ticket deflection as a term, trended in customer support quite lately. It is a practice that allows customers to seek solutions to their queries independently and results in ticket reduction and reduced tickets. This improves the efficiency of customer support teams, allowing them to focus on more complex queries, and organizations can utilize the saved resources to tackle these challenges. Ticket deflection can be achieved through various strategies that will be discussed throughout this blog.
Tracking the volume of support tickets over time provides a direct measure of the impact of ticket deflection strategies.
What is Ticket Deflection?
At its very core, ticket deflection is a process that helps customers self serve and get their queries resolved without even opening a ticket. The ticket deflection process begins when a customer initiates a support interaction, such as starting a query or visiting a support page, which then triggers self-service options aimed at resolving the issue before a ticket is created. Customers answer their questions themselves by using tools like chatbots, knowledge base or FAQs. When the solution to a customer’s query is displayed in any of the self-service channels, they can easily access it and if they have their questions answered from the displayed solutions, it results in lessening the number of tickets generated for your support system.
Improves customer self-service option
Reduces support costs
Enhances customer experience without compromising on service quality
Lowers the ticket volume which translates into fewer tickets, payroll savings and a manageable workload for the existing employees.
A comprehensive knowledge base allows customers to solve their issues independently by looking through articles and guides.
Customers get the flexibility of self-service which leads to empowerment and job satisfaction. Customer service teams and support teams can concentrate on resolving complex customer queries that need personalized attention and thereby improve their productivity and job satisfaction.
How to Measure Ticket Deflection?
To accurately measure the performance of ticket deflection strategies, businesses should focus on the ticket deflection rate, which is the percentage of support tickets that are solved using self-service support options. This metric helps determine how effective self-service tools are at resolving customer issues without agent intervention. Other useful metrics include the number of views on posts in the self-service portal and the total number of support tickets. For example, the ticket deflection ratio is the number of self-service interactions divided by the total number of support tickets. A high ticket deflection ratio or ticket deflection rate suggests customers are finding answers to their queries by themselves.
Other metrics like chatbot task completion rates help in estimating how effectively customers are able to get their tasks accomplished with automated responses, contributing to overall service success.
What are the tools for ticket deflection?
There are various tools that play a crucial role in empowering your customers to resolve issues independently. A self service knowledge base or built in knowledge base serves as an integrated repository of FAQs, support articles, and guides that customers can easily search to find answers to their queries. These knowledge bases often include AI-powered search and enterprise search capabilities, leveraging artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning to deliver highly relevant and accurate results. AI-powered knowledge bases utilize machine learning for Google-like search that understands intent, suggests relevant articles, and deflects tickets by providing immediate answers.
Chatbots and chat tools display customer responses in a conversational manner and provide immediate support, which reduces the number of customer support tickets generated.
Community forums allow customers to interact and share knowledge to solve their queries, which in turn lowers the volume of tickets. Digital adoption solutions provide in-app guidance to customers and enable them to find answers to their questions without opening a ticket. These tools help in ticket deflection, allowing customers to resolve issues on their own without needing the assistance of a customer support agent, by leveraging various self-service features such as support articles and real-time suggestions.
Knowledge Bases
Easily, the most important tool for any ticket deflection strategy is the self service knowledge base. It is essentially a centralized location for customers to get support documentation and find answers to their queries. A knowledge base consists of support articles, FAQs and how-to guides that are easily searchable and regularly updated. Knowledge bases with features like images, GIFs and videos provide customers with precise information while keeping them engaged by avoiding heavy explanations.
Delivering accurate responses to customer queries is crucial, and advanced search capabilities in knowledge base software help ensure users quickly find the most relevant information. Self-service tools are significantly enhanced by organizing and categorizing content through effective metadata and taxonomy, making it easier for customers to navigate and access the right support articles.
Other features like a no-code editor and an integrated search bar in knowledge base software can improve user experience and make self-service options more accessible.
Chatbots
Artificial intelligence and machine learning-based chatbots are taking the customer support space by storm. These virtual assistants deliver ai powered assistance, leveraging the power of instant personalized support to customers and using data from customer interactions to improve their responses, thereby reducing the need for a customer service agent.
Chatbots can also be used to update customers about the status of their tickets thereby reducing the necessity for them to keep contacting support, repetitively.
When chatbots are integrated with knowledge bases, they empower organizations to deliver accurate and timely solutions to customers queries 24*7. These chatbots can provide ai generated answers to customer queries, enabling efficient self-service and ticket deflection. Modern AI agents use natural language processing (NLP) to understand intent rather than just keywords, providing human-like responses 24/7. The advancements in natural language processing only add to the capabilities of chatbots to resolve customer queries in a more human-like manner.
Community Forums
Peer-to-peer support on community forums allows customers to share a common platform to interact and share knowledge to solve common queries. Community forums play a crucial role in helping customers find answers independently, empowering users to resolve their issues without direct support intervention. This can have a tremendous impact on the volume of tickets as customers can get their queries answered by others who have faced similar problems, without approaching the support team. Higher Logic, for example, focuses on building customer advocacy communities where 73% of inquiries can often be solved by peer-to-peer content.
It is important to ensure that the knowledge shared on forums is accurate and regularly updated as outdated knowledge can increase customer annoyance.
Digital Adoption Platforms
Digital adoption platforms (DAPs) offer in-app guidance to customers and users to help them navigate software applications without direct support. These platforms use features like tooltips, product tours, checklists, and customizable UI elements to help users navigate and find functionalities effectively. Targeted self-service is delivered exactly where the user is struggling within a digital product, ensuring assistance is provided at the point of need. Some of the advantages of DAPs include:
In-app embedded support
Interactive walkthroughs
Users can learn complex features on their own
Customer support tickets are reduced or eliminated.
Saas companies have used DAPs successfully to improve user satisfaction and in the process, implemented ticket deflection.
Customer Portal
A customer portal acts as a centralized hub where users can seamlessly access all the support resources they need, manage their accounts, and find answers to their questions—without having to contact support teams directly. By offering a user-friendly and easily accessible customer portal, businesses empower customers to resolve issues independently, which significantly reduces support tickets and streamlines the workload for support teams.
An effective customer portal should feature a comprehensive knowledge base with up-to-date, accurate information, as well as intuitive navigation to help users quickly locate relevant articles, FAQs, and step-by-step guides. When customers have easy access to a robust customer portal, they are more likely to find solutions on their own, leading to higher customer satisfaction and a measurable reduction in support tickets. Ultimately, a well-designed customer portal not only improves the customer experience but also enables support teams to focus on more complex issues, driving greater efficiency across the organization.
Practices to implement ticket deflection
To enjoy the benefits of ticket deflection, it is necessary to follow certain best practices that help optimize self-service tools and resources like the ones mentioned below. Self-service not only empowers customers but also allows for better team focus, enabling support teams to concentrate on more complex or high-impact issues.
Creating a knowledge base
Investing in smart chatbots
Promoting self-service
Creating interactive resources like troubleshooting guides and how-to videos to help customers resolve their issues independently
Collecting valuable customer feedback
Following these practices ensures that customers have a hassle-free experience when looking for solutions on their own, resulting in fewer tickets, improving customer satisfaction, and fostering customer loyalty.
Creating a Knowledge Base
One of the most important parts of a successful ticket deflection strategy is creating a knowledge base. It should offer a plethora of information ranging from articles to video tutorials and how-to videos, catering to different types of customers. Video guides and tutorials are powerful self-help tools that can explain processes in a dynamic way, making it easier for users to troubleshoot and learn independently. Knowledge bases that are updated regularly with new product information and solutions to new issues ensure that customers trust the organization enough to get reliable information from it.
The knowledge base should have a categorization of the topics and include elements that provide a better user experience like visuals and how-to videos to make customers inclined towards self-service.
Investing in Smart Chatbots
Smart chatbots are saviors for any support team. By providing instant answers to customer queries, they can easily tackle simple queries on their own and if needed, redirect complex queries to an assigned customer support agent, thereby maintaining the balance between automation and personalized customer support. These tools resolve routine inquiries like 'Where is my order?' or password resets without human intervention.
AI-powered chatbots that are integrated with CRM systems can help businesses offer a more personalized experience by adapting to the history and preferences of individual customers.
Promoting Self-Service
Promoting self-service channels and resources like knowledge base and FAQs can encourage customers to adopt them. It's important to highlight that offering just a help center is often not enough—businesses should consider providing a comprehensive customer portal that integrates multiple features, such as account management, ticket tracking, and proactive support, to deliver a more seamless experience. Businesses can highlight the facilities of self-service on their websites and communicate the same to customers with possible incentives. This can improve adoption rates and customer satisfaction.
This would not just empower your customers but also reduce the load on your customer support team.
Collecting Customer Feedback
An effective way to improve ticket deflection strategies is to collect and analyze customer feedback. This includes gathering user feedback through microsurveys within the product environment and analyzing search queries on the support portal, especially those that return no results, to identify gaps in self-service content. Facilities to implement feedback collection tools and regularly analyzing the data can help companies identify areas to improve and optimize their self-service resources.
Feedback from users can help optimize the case deflection rate by indicating what does and doesn't work in self-service documentation. This process enables companies to optimize FAQs and other self-service tools according to customer preferences and expectations, thereby improving their efficiency in ticket deflection.
User Engagement
User engagement is a cornerstone of successful self service customer support. It encompasses the ways customers interact with self service tools such as knowledge bases, FAQs, and chatbots. High user engagement means customers are actively using self service channels to find instant answers and resolve their issues, which in turn reduces support requests and enhances customer satisfaction.
To boost user engagement, businesses should prioritize intuitive design and seamless navigation within their self service solutions. Incorporating features like semantic search capabilities, personalized content recommendations, and interactive guides can make it easier for users to find relevant information quickly. The more engaged users are with self service tools, the more effective these solutions become at deflecting tickets and providing a positive customer support experience. By continuously optimizing self service channels for engagement, companies can maximize the impact of their self service customer support strategy.
In-App Support
In-app support brings self service tools and resources directly into the software application or website, allowing users to access help articles, tutorials, and support resources without ever leaving the app. This approach provides contextual assistance at the exact moment and place users need it, reducing friction and making it easier for customers to solve problems independently.
Features such as tooltips, guided tours, and contextual help pop-ups can deliver targeted information and step-by-step instructions, enhancing user engagement and reducing the likelihood of support tickets being created. By integrating in-app support, businesses not only reduce support tickets but also improve the overall user experience, ensuring that customers can find answers quickly and efficiently within the app environment. This proactive approach to support empowers users and helps support teams focus on more complex or high-priority issues.
Challenges and Risks in Ticket Deflection
There are certain challenges and risks associated with ticket deflection. Implementing ineffective strategies can increase customer frustration if the self-service resources are incomplete or buggy. User forums with outdated information can lead to customer annoyance which in turn affects customer satisfaction, highlighting the importance of maintaining an effective support site. While AI technology in self-service offers deepens user engagement with product knowledge and provides increasingly personalized service to customers, it is crucial to ensure that customers can easily access human support when needed to address more complex or sensitive issues.
Proactively updating customers about the status of a ticket or any important changes that occur on them, reduces the necessity for them to keep contacting support, repetitively.
Also, organizations can miss out on detecting complex customer queries if they rely heavily on automation and avoid human interaction.
Avoiding Customer Annoyance
Customer annoyance can be avoided by ensuring that the self-service resources do not appear buggy and are easily understandable by the customers. A responsive customer service team that works in conjunction with the customer support team can jump in through customer service software when the customer seems stuck and offer help.
This would prevent customer annoyance from escalating to customer dissatisfaction.
For example, FAQs and knowledge bases should be comprehensive and clear to provide customers with necessary information without approaching support.
Balancing Automation with Human Interaction
There should be a fine balance between automation and human interaction to ensure the success of any ticket deflection strategy. Automated systems must be capable of detecting when the customer’s query needs personal attention and escalate accordingly.
This would ensure that a majority of the tickets are deflected but the ones that require support are accurately addressed.
Continuous Monitoring of Metrics
For effective maintenance of a ticket deflection strategy, it is important to continuously monitor essential metrics. Support teams can make informed decisions about optimizing their ticket deflection strategies by analyzing the data.
Data from customer interactions can help in identifying the working and non-working aspects of the implemented strategies.
Multilingual Support
Multilingual support is essential for businesses serving a global or diverse customer base. By providing self service resources and support channels in multiple languages, companies ensure that customers can access information and resolve their queries in their preferred language, which greatly enhances customer satisfaction and user engagement.
Implementing multilingual support can involve translating knowledge base articles, FAQs, and help content, as well as deploying AI-powered chatbots capable of understanding and responding to customer queries in various languages. This approach not only broadens the reach of self service solutions but also ensures that all customers have equal access to support resources. By investing in multilingual support, businesses can improve the effectiveness of their self service strategy, reduce language barriers, and deliver a more inclusive and satisfying customer experience.
Examples of Successful Ticket Deflection
Ticket deflection in action is a testimony to its effectiveness and success in real-world scenarios. Companies across industries from e-commerce to SaaS have implemented tools that have not just reduced their volume of support tickets but also improved their customer experience.
E-commerce Sector
Chatbots have the potential to disrupt the customer support sector in e-commerce. An online retailer implemented smart chatbots that displayed instant shipping information to customers from the knowledge base.
This resulted in a 25% decrease in the number of support tickets and provided a superior customer experience.
SaaS Sector
A leading SaaS company reduced its support tickets by a whopping 45% by implementing a well-structured and comprehensive knowledge base. This improved customer satisfaction and made the support process effective and efficient.
Some CRM providers, such as HubSpot Service Hub, bundle customer service tools and customer portals into their premium plans, further improving customer experience and reducing churn.
Telecom Sector
Companies in the telekom sector have also reaped benefits from ticket deflection by implementing community forums. A leading telecom provider implemented community forums to enable their customers to interact and help each other solve their queries.
This resulted in a significant drop in the volume of support tickets.
The company also enhanced FAQs on their website which enabled them to effectively handle routine queries from customers.
Trends in Ticket Deflection
In the near future, ticket deflection strategies will witness a major transformation. With continuous improvements in AI and machine learning and the adoption of natural language processing, the way self-service tools operate will change drastically.
It is estimated that by 2025, 60% of customers will search for answers from 3rd party sites. Therefore, the importance of ticket deflection strategies will only increase in the future to manage effective support while catering to customer requirements.
Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning
AI and machine learning based tools can scale up the capabilities of ticket deflection strategies in the future. AI copilots will reduce cost per ticket and agent turnover by efficiently handling the growing volume of customer queries.
This would not just improve the resolution time for customers but also provide a more satisfying work environment for support agents.
Natural Language Processing
Natural language processing (NLP) will be another area of focus for ticket deflection strategies in the future. AI-powered chatbots with NLP capabilities can deliver more human-like interactions and provide a better self-service experience to customers.
This would enable advanced chatbots to understand complex queries from customers with higher accuracy.
Omnichannel Support
Ticket deflection strategies will be integrated with omnichannel support in the future to provide a consistent experience across different customer touchpoints.
By synchronizing customer interactions, businesses can avoid the generation of duplicate tickets and offer the same response whether the customer contacts them through email, mobile or social media.
This comprehensive approach is necessary to meet customer expectations in the increasingly hyper-connected world.
Measuring Success in Ticket Deflection
Measuring the success of ticket deflection strategies is crucial for understanding their impact and identifying opportunities for improvement. Key metrics to monitor include the ticket deflection rate, which tracks the percentage of support requests resolved through self service channels, and overall support volume, which reflects the total number of support tickets received. Monitoring these metrics helps businesses determine how effectively their self service resources are reducing the need for direct support.
Customer satisfaction is another vital metric, often measured through surveys, feedback forms, and net promoter scores. By analyzing these data points, organizations can assess whether their self service channels are meeting customer needs and expectations. Regularly reviewing these metrics enables support teams to refine their ticket deflection strategies, optimize self service resources, and ultimately deliver a superior customer experience while keeping support costs in check.
Ticketing System
A ticketing system is the backbone of modern customer support operations, providing a centralized platform for managing and tracking support requests. It enables support agents to efficiently receive, assign, and resolve tickets, while also allowing customers to submit and monitor their own support requests.
For maximum effectiveness, a ticketing system should be tightly integrated with self service tools such as knowledge bases and chatbots. This integration allows for seamless ticket deflection, as customers are guided to relevant self service resources before a new ticket is created. AI-powered ticketing systems can further enhance efficiency by automating responses to common customer queries, providing valuable insights into support trends, and helping to reduce overall support volume.
By leveraging a robust ticketing system, businesses can streamline their support processes, empower support agents to focus on complex issues, and improve customer satisfaction through faster, more accurate resolutions.
Conclusion
To conclude, ticket deflection is an important aspect of modern customer support that offers mutual benefits to organizations and customers. By adopting appropriate tools and practices, organizations can reduce the volume of support tickets and at the same time, provide customers with a sense of self-sufficiency.
As we move forward, the game of customer support will be changed forever with the adoption of bleeding-edge technologies and integration with omnichannel support. Embrace these strategies and you’ll be on your way to creating a customer support system that’s both efficient and satisfying.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is ticket deflection and why is it important for customer support?
Ticket deflection is important for customer support because it reduces the number of support tickets by enabling customers to find solutions through self-service resources, thus improving efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Why is ticket deflection important for customer satisfaction?
Ticket deflection improves customer satisfaction by providing quick and easy access to solutions, reducing wait times for support, and empowering customers to resolve issues on their own. This leads to faster resolutions and a more efficient support system.
How can AI-driven search functionality enhance ticket deflection?
AI-driven search functionality can enhance ticket deflection by providing more accurate and relevant search results, helping customers find the right information quickly. It can also suggest related articles and resources, increasing the chances of customers resolving their issues independently.
What role do chatbots play in ticket deflection?
Chatbots play a significant role in ticket deflection by providing instant responses to common queries, guiding customers through troubleshooting processes, and even escalating more complex issues to human agents if necessary. This helps to handle routine inquiries efficiently and reduces the workload on support teams.
