how an 18-agent support team deflected a third of its tickets
we shipped internal retrieval plus draft-and-review for a mid-market e-commerce cx team. ~32% of repeat tickets resolved at first touch. no chatbot.
the build. we built two things for a mid-market e-commerce support team of about 18 agents: internal retrieval across 4 years of historical tickets, product docs, and shipping policies, plus a draft-and-review reply assistant. agents got faster, cited answers. about 32% of repeat tickets stopped reaching a second agent.
no customer-facing chatbot was shipped. the team turned one off years ago and did not want it back. the deflection comes from agents answering correctly on the first reply, not from a bot intercepting customers at the door.
the numbers a support lead cares about: first-response time on complex tickets down 40%, and about 32% of repeat 'where-is-my-order' and policy questions resolved at first touch via a suggested answer instead of escalating. the deflection figure is from the team's own ticket-tagging baseline, not a vendor estimate.
what is ai ticket deflection if there's no chatbot?
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