One post tagged with "deflection"

A support leader I spoke with last quarter was glowing about a 78% deflection rate from the new AI agent. Tickets routed to humans had collapsed; cost per contact looked beautiful; the dashboard sparkled green for three straight months. Then revenue ops ran a cohort analysis. The customers who had hit the bot at least once during a billing question were churning at 1.7x the rate of customers who had not. The deflection metric had not measured help. It had measured silence — and silence turned out to be the sound of paying users walking out the door.

This is the failure mode that the industry is now naming aloud. Deflection counts conversations where the customer did not reach a human. It does not distinguish "I got my answer" from "I gave up." Treat those as the same number and you will optimize for the second one, because making the bot harder to escape is much easier than making it actually resolve issues. Klarna learned this publicly in 2026 when it began rehiring customer service staff a year after announcing AI had replaced roughly 700 agents; repeat contacts had jumped about 25%, and the savings line that justified the layoffs evaporated against the cost of re-handling everything the bot mishandled the first time.