Deflection is a metric for walls.

Every support-automation deck has the same slide. A big number — 60%, 75%, 90% — and the word deflection. The number goes up and to the right. Everyone nods. I used to make that slide.

The number

Deflection counts a conversation as a success when the customer does not reach a human. That is the whole definition. It does not ask whether the problem was solved. It does not ask whether the customer gave up, went to Twitter, or filed a chargeback. A customer who rage-quits a chatbot after six minutes is a deflected ticket. A perfect score.

A wall deflects. A door resolves. The industry has spent twenty years getting very good at walls.

What it actually measures

Deflection measures friction. It rewards every design decision that makes a human harder to reach: the hidden contact form, the three-article detour, the “did this answer your question?” button nobody clicks. It is the single number most responsible for support being the least-loved department in most companies — and it is the number most vendors are paid on.

When we started Oriel, we tried to report deflection alongside resolution, because buyers asked for it. We stopped within a quarter. The two numbers moved in opposite directions often enough that keeping both on the dashboard made the product worse: teams tuned for the one that was easier to raise.

71% resolved

How we count instead

A conversation is resolved when the agent took an action or gave an answer, and the customer either confirmed it or did not come back within 72 hours. Reopens are subtracted. Every week we pull a 2% sample and three humans re-grade it blind; the published number is corrected to match the sample, and so is the invoice.

resolved  = confirmed + (silent_72h − reopened_30d)
reported  = resolved × audit_correction      // weekly, 2% sample, 3 graders
billable  = reported − handoffs              // handoffs are always free

It is a stricter number. Ours is lower than the deflection figure any competitor will show you, sometimes by thirty points. It is also the only one of the two that tells you whether your customers are being helped.

What it costs us

We have lost deals over this — procurement teams comparing a 71% to a 90% on a spreadsheet and not reading the footnote. We will keep losing some. But the customers who do read the footnote are the ones who stay, and who send us the next one. Over four years that has been a better business than the slide.

If you are evaluating vendors, ask one question: show me how you count. If the answer takes more than two sentences, you are looking at a wall.

— Mara Adeyemi is CEO of Oriel. She ran support teams for nine years before that.