The power (and savings) of automated call deflection

The first phone call ever made was essentially a support call. Alexander Graham Bell said to his assistant, Thomas Watson, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” Nearly 200 years later, the support call is still here — and it’s still popular. Today, customers call businesses to address anything from sales to support to FAQs. Contact center agents deal with more than 50 calls a day, but a phone call might not always be the best or most efficient way for customers to resolve their issue. Using automated call deflection, you can serve up solutions to your customers, enable higher contact center agent productivity, and reduce costs. 

What is call deflection? 

Call deflection is the process of routing your customer’s inquiry from a call to an alternative path like a self-service experience, live chat with an agent, email, or webform. Instead of assuming that a phone call is by default the best and only option for your customer to connect with your business, call deflection offers multiple avenues of outreach that are uniquely fitted to address your customer’s problems. 

What customers value more than talking to a support agent over the phone is the ability to get the information, service, or resolution they need quickly. When businesses route all of their customer inquiries through an IVR or phone experience, they create a bottleneck for their contact center agents that can drain CSAT and increase contact center costs.

How does call deflection work? 

For example, let’s say someone is trying to get a hold of you, a ticket broker, with a question about their seats for an event they’re attending tonight. At the same time, a person with a suite of VIP box seats needs to double-check their guest list for that same show. 

Without any automated, intelligent call deflection, or a well-orchestrated IVR, you would likely have no insight into the value and urgency of either customer’s needs. Both individuals would wait on hold until a customer service agent could address their requests. But, using Airkit’s SaaS-powered, low-code platform, you can serve both customers intelligently and efficiently. 

Airkit ties into the marketing and customer service systems you know and love, connecting your IVR to your chat platform, your CRM, your email support service, your website, and even live chat. So, you can orchestrate where you’d like to deflect a call to and what that process looks like.

Let’s return to our two callers — one with a question about their seats, and the other with a more elaborate question about their VIP box guest list. The first caller simply wants to confirm their seats, a process that can be handled by a self-serve flow. So, when they call in, you can offer that customer to opt into a self-serve flow where they can confirm their seat placement then and there on their phone through your website, without waiting on hold for a support agent. 

For our VIP box seat caller, they might need to speak with a customer support agent. When they dial in, you can build an IVR prompt to determine they’re indeed VIP and expedite their request to the right agent. That’s the power of call deflection — to direct every call to the most appropriate resolution fast, especially when that’s something other than a phone call.

What are the benefits of call deflection? 

When a customer waits on hold for an extended period of time, they’re likely to have a less favorable impression of your business and your customer service. So as hold time ticks upwards, that customer’s CSAT scores tick downwards. 

Call deflection saves customers time and saves businesses money.

Peer-to-peer car-sharing network and Airkit customer, Turo, cut 19 minutes off of their average customer support handle time by building call deflection journeys and using new self-serve channels to assist customers. Using call deflection, they routed high traffic use cases that were originally resolved by a contact center agent to a self-serve flow so customers could get back on the road faster.

Towing logistics and management company, AutoReturn, also used Airkit to streamline the process of reuniting car owners with their cars. Now, callers can fill out a request for information on their recently towed car using a self-serve flow as opposed to waiting on hold to speak to an agent. This new process led to a 20% overall decrease in call volume, saving the company a tremendous amount in contact center costs. 

Build automated call deflection with Airkit 

Airkit makes it easy to build customer-first, company-friendly CX at scale. Our low-code platform gives you intuitive tools to craft the exact customer experience you had in mind, like call deflection. Get started building by learning about our Call Deflection capabilities.