The word comes from the queue
Deflection is a word from inside a support operation. It says a conversation did not reach a person, and nothing about whether the customer got what they came for.
Two very different endings leave the queue the same way. A customer who got a correct answer is deflected, and so is one who read an article that did not apply and called again the next morning.
Deflection counts the customers who stopped waiting in your queue. It has no way to see the ones who went on waiting somewhere else.
For most of the product’s life, the first number on our analytics screen was deflection, because buyers asked for it. This month we took it off.
What the old number was counting
On one busy desk, an ordinary week brought in 5,000 conversations across chat, email and the phone, and 82% ended without a person. That is the figure that would have gone on the slide.
Of those deflected customers, 700 came back about the same thing within days, or went quiet with their last question unanswered. Leave them out and 68% were settled, on the same week and the same customers.
What we count instead
Resolution is now the first number on the screen. A conversation counts as resolved when it closed without a person, its last question had an answer, and the customer did not return about the same intent within seven days, on any channel.
That last condition depends on every channel sharing one memory. A chat on Tuesday and a call on Thursday about the same refund are one thread, so the call counts against the chat.
What it cost us to switch
The number went down. We wrote to every customer who reads that screen before the change, with their old and new figures side by side, because a figure that falls without warning reads as a broken product.
It is also late. A conversation cannot count as resolved until its window has closed, so the latest week is always provisional.
And it changed which flows look good. A returns flow that links to the policy and closes the thread scores well on deflection and badly on resolution, because the customer still has no label. The flows that rose were the ones that issued the label, moved the booking or credited the charge.
What to do on your floor
Stop reporting deflection on its own. If someone above you needs it, show it beside resolution, so the gap is the thing they see.
Choose a return window, write it down and keep it, because a window that shrinks whenever the number falls is a deflection rate again.
Count a return on any channel against the conversation it came from. Moving from chat to the phone is not a new problem.
Every week, read a sample of the threads that went quiet, because silence is the one ending a transcript cannot explain.
Resolution will always read lower than deflection, and that is the point. Deflection is what the queue was spared, and resolution is what the customer came for.
