What Deflection rate means in practice
Deflection rate is the headline metric for conversational AI in enterprise customer-contact use. It measures the percentage of inbound interactions the bot resolves without escalating to a human. The honest version of the metric nets out re-contacts: if a customer's chat is "resolved" by the bot but they then call back the same day on the same issue, that doesn't count. Industry-honest deflection rates for well-deployed sovereign chatbots in regulated industries are 50–70%; vendor-marketed numbers that ignore re-contact are commonly 85%+, which is why the procurement question to ask is "deflection net of next-7-day re-contact".
Related terms
Conversational AI →
AI systems that interact with users through natural-language dialogue — chatbots, voice agents, virtual assistants — typically combining intent classification, retrieval, and generation.
Intent classification →
The NLU step of mapping a user's free-text or speech input to one of a curated set of "intents" the system knows how to handle.
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