Glossary
Ticket deflection rate
The percentage of customer requests resolved by self-service or AI before reaching a human agent.
Ticket deflection rate measures the percentage of customer requests resolved before they reach a human agent, whether through self-service help articles, in-app guidance, or autonomous AI resolution. Healthy modern support teams reach 50 to 70 percent deflection within the first quarter of running AI Agent on routine ticket categories. Deflection is most useful as a unit-economics input: every deflected ticket is a unit of human time saved, multiplied by the cost per agent hour. Watch for the failure mode where deflection is gamed by hiding contact options; real deflection comes from actually resolving the customer's issue, not just preventing the inbound.
Related terms
- AI Agent: An autonomous software agent that can resolve customer support tickets without a human in the loop.
- Auto-resolution: When AI fully resolves a customer support ticket without a human reply.
- First contact resolution (FCR): The percentage of tickets resolved on the first reply, without follow-up exchanges or escalations.