One of the success secrets for a company is self-service. No wonder it is a trending preference when it comes to service and support. Case deflection is one of the technologies to deliver a great customer experience.

Case deflection is estimating the level of how customers can find answers by themselves to issues that otherwise would demand their calling to support. It makes team support scalable and helps to endure requests peaks to tech support without decreasing the latter’s quality.

ClickHelp is a modern documentation tool that can help implement case deflection for existing support processes.

Generally, case deflection is understood as a means to decrease the workload for the support team. Whenever you deflect a case, you treat a problem before it ever gets to your support team, never reaching it, ultimately driving higher customer satisfaction. Therefore, it is essential to know how to measure and improve case deflection for any customer support strategy.

However, a generic case deflection percentage shouldn’t be your goal — instead, your metrics should be a reflection of customer experience or satisfaction, rather than a vague number. Because a 100% deflection rate is almost unachievable there will always be new, unexplored issues that will have to be examined and resolved. Here is some essential data you can track:

• Visitors — the number of people who visited your portal.
• Content — evaluate which help topics are the most helpful for deflecting cases.
• Discussions – measure the most helpful discussions for deflecting cases.
• Average time on a page — the time readers spend on any topic on average.
• Search queries – what topics are in highest demand, how many people click to see the result.

Online documentation helps customers resolve their issues. ClickHelp can save your time and efforts.

• Create Online Documentation. Proper documentation is a critical part of the case deflection mechanism. An easy-to-use solution for creating content allows you to work on documents and projects collaboratively and efficiently in a single cloud environment and assist with case deflection.
• Use Context-Sensitive Help. This mechanism also can be applied for case deflection. A user doesn’t even need to search for anything since popup windows or links in the UI can give them answers before they think up a question. Think of it as a proactive case deflection.
• Deflect ticket submissions with ClickHelp Full-Text Search API. People use search quite often, so you need to ensure this tool is fast and highly accurate. Embed search into your app with our API and implement searching for answers right inside your application.
• Build Public Knowledge Base. Instead of answering the same question over and over, you can direct customers to an online knowledge base before they submit a case. Such Knowledge bases (KB) are indexed by Google, so it is a good idea to create your own KB since people tend to google things in search of answers. With ClickHelp, you can create public KBs, so they are available on Google.
• Use Feedback Widget. Readers’ feedback is an essential part of developing effective documentation, it helps to monitor end users’ satisfaction, and, based on this information, you can improve your content. Each thumb up can be considered a deflected case. However, not all users leave feedback and in reality, deflection is higher. So, this should be taken into account when calculating deflection rate: you can use the number of topic views to estimate case deflection as a percentage of this number. You’ll need to determine the deflection ratio yourself, based on your audience and documentation specifics. This will be a rough estimate but you’ll be able to see the general trend – whether the potential case deflection is increasing or decreasing.
• Track statistics. Statistics is what can help to increase case deflection. See what users are searching for, their clicks in search results, and requests without results. This way you can get the information on what to improve based on actual inquiries and not your assumptions.

Since creating documentation is a proactive job with an additional workload, it should be implemented as smoothly as possible. With ClickHelp the creation of a good knowledge base or an online user guide is easy.