NewDesk team4 min read
You know the wall
Answer three questions. Rate the answer. Confirm you still need help. Wait. The bot is called Ava and has a photo of someone who does not work there. The number behind all of that is deflection, how many conversations a human never touched, and if you optimise a widget for deflection you get a wall.
That is not a technology limit. That is a decision about what the widget is for. I made the opposite decision.
Your team is on screen from message one
In NewDesk the person on shift is named at the top of every chat, by the alias they picked, and one click reaches them. No quiz. No rating. Out of hours the widget says when a human will pick it up, and whatever the AI could not sort is on top of the queue in the morning.
The AI answers next to that button, not instead of it. It answers from your own pages and shows where the answer came from. If nothing covers the question it says so and gets a person, instead of making something up.
Human first means a whole human
Not a chat window with a human somewhere behind it. When typing is not cutting it, the customer starts a voice or video call from the same widget, shares their screen, and your teammate picks up on the desk or on their phone. If now is a bad time, they book a call. Nobody dials a number. Nobody installs anything.
The AI is signed as the AI
It never gets a human name and a stock face. It never says "let me connect you to a colleague" about itself. On Self-Owned you can give it your name and your avatar, and it still says what it is. Customers can tell, and they trust you more for it.
What I look at instead of deflection
How many questions got answered right. How fast a human turned up when someone wanted one. Whether the customer came back. Deflection goes down on NewDesk because more people pick a human, and I am fine with that. A support desk is for supporting people.