Poll Results (Part 2): Average Call Deflection
By Paulo Barrett, Manger of Implementation Services
As I mentioned in a previous post, we hosted a webinar in which we polled our audience on a couple questions. One of the questions was “What call deflection rate would you expect to get from a virtual assistant?” Here’s what you said.
- 33% of you would be happy if your virtual assistant deflected 15% of calls to your contact center.
- About 52% would love call deflection rates to be between 25-35%.
- 14% of you would be ecstatic if a virtual agent could deflect more than ½ of your calls.
The fact is that there is no right answer. Every business is different, but we’ve seen all of these rates. On average our customers deflect 20-30% of their calls, but some customers reach 50%, and one customer deflected 80% of their live chat conversations. What drives this is sometimes how visible your virtual assistant is in the process and how privy it is to information. The deeper your implementation and the more visible your virtual assistant, the better the results will be. But of course it all depends on your goals. Either way, virtual assistants are extremely powerful tools in reducing customer support costs so even a deflection of 15% can make a powerful impact a call center receiving millions of calls per year.
If you missed the webinar or want to watch it again, you can view it online and if you want to see previous poll results, check out this post.
