Master ticket deflection with AI: 10 strategies for effective customer service

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(NLP) and Machine Learning(ML) to offer real-time and personalized responses to queries. Not only do advanced chatbots do an incredible job of understanding complex questions, they are also able to analyze intent and sentiment to provide customized responses. These chatbots can take on a large part of your L1 support requests and reduce the number of tickets created.

2. Integrate 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 documents. Integrating various systems within your organization, such as your CRM tools, billing systems, help desks and so on 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. Imagine AI identifying gaps in the information your website offers and even assisting you with creating articles to bridge these gaps. What’s more, AI can measure just how helpful your support resources are, helping you fine-tune them to match exactly what your customers need.

4. Analyze customer feedback

Chatbots don’t just deliver quick answers, they also gather valuable data. By asking simple follow-up questions such as “Did I answer your question?”, you can collect the data you need to understand how well your chatbots are working. With that data in hand, you can analyze the performance of your ticket deflection strategies, and then fine-tune your chatbot’s performance to handle support queries even more efficiently.

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 give you detailed analytics on FAQ categories, common issues and customer intent, giving you valuable insights to create an FAQ section that truly serves your customers’ needs.

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!