What is Deflection rate?
Deflection rate is the share of support inquiries resolved through self-service, such as help articles or bots, so that no ticket reaches a human agent.
In more detail
Deflection and containment overlap. Containment usually means conversations a bot handled start to finish. Deflection is broader and includes help-center visits that prevent a ticket. It is harder to measure, because you must infer that someone who read an article would otherwise have contacted you. Teams approximate it by tracking article views followed by no ticket within a set window. Treat it as a directional metric. Good deflection comes from answering the ten most common questions well, with accurate, current articles. Bad deflection is making the contact form hard to find. Pair it with CSAT.
Example
A SaaS company rewrites its 'reset SSO' article and adds an AI answer box. Page views barely change, but SSO tickets drop. The ticket count, not the page view count, shows whether deflection worked.