Blog
January 21, 2025
An overload of support tickets is frustrating for both your support team and your customers.
Your team is overwhelmed and struggling to keep up with the ticket volume, and your customers are impatient with the long wait times to get their issues resolved.
The best way to strike a balance between making your team’s workload manageable and keeping your customers happy with prompt, effective service is to find solutions that decrease the volume of tickets submitted.
In this blog, we’ll explore how good documentation can help you do just that.
Table of Contents
- What is Ticket Deflection?
- The Role of Documentation in Ticket Deflection
- Measuring Documentation Effectiveness
- Build Documentation That Makes a Difference
What is Ticket Deflection?
Ticket deflection happens when users get their questions answered without ever submitting a ticket or interacting with a live member of a support team. This is usually because they find the information they need through self-service measures, such as a help center.
It’s up to technical leaders within an organization to implement tools and establish processes that increase ticket deflection. There is a wide variety of tools available to assist in these efforts, from platforms for user-facing documentation to other technologies that can act as a substitute for interacting with a support team.
For example, chatbots are one common way to deflect tickets. Before connecting you with a live person, many help centers direct users to go through a series of prompts with a bot.
The goal is for the bot to answer simple questions that users often have, saving more complicated and unique cases for the live support team.
However, this is just one of many strategies for deflecting tickets. Now, let's focus on strategies specifically related to written documentation.
The Role of Documentation in Ticket Deflection
One of the most effective ways to deflect tickets is by creating clear, helpful user-facing documentation—it's cost-effective and relatively easy to maintain with the right tools.
There are two steps to creating documentation that deflects tickets. First, you need to make it easy to navigate and understand. Then, you need to ensure it is accessible to users when they need it (even if they might not know they need it).
Build a Clear, Organized Help Center
If a customer visits your help center to submit a ticket and finds a well-organized, comprehensive library of content with troubleshooting guides and answers to frequently asked questions, they may be able to find what they need without help from another person.
This saves the user time as they don’t need to wait to interact with a support team member, and it saves your team time by cutting down the number of tickets they need to resolve.
Confluence makes it easy to create and maintain your documentation, especially if you are using Jira for your service desk. You can create a dedicated help center space within Confluence and make pages public as they are completed.
When you build out your help center content, make sure to follow best practices for clear communication—after all, documentation isn’t helpful if your users can’t find what they’re looking for, or if they need to spend lots of time reading to get their answers.
Here are a few resources to help you make the most out of Confluence:
Integrate Documentation with JSM Forms
Let’s say a user doesn’t want to spend time searching your documentation for answers, even if you have put in the effort to make it as helpful and navigable as possible. Instead, they just want to interact with a real person, so they go straight for a form to submit a ticket.
That doesn’t mean the ticket can’t still be deflected—you just need to integrate your Jira Service Management (JSM) forms with the help center documentation that you created in Confluence.
When you integrate a Confluence space with JSM, the form can suggest content to users based on information they input. If their submission relates to a topic you have documented, they can see and visit that documentation without leaving the form.
If they don’t find the answer they are looking for, they can go right back to the form and continue filling it out. Of course, the goal is that they will find their answer and not need to finish submitting the form.
Learn more about the relationship between Confluence and JSM in our webinar on workflow efficiency >>
Measuring Documentation Effectiveness
If a page within your Confluence help center gives a user the answer they are looking for, they have the option to mark the content as helpful, which is a direct signal to you that your ticket deflection strategy is working.
However, even if users don’t choose to provide feedback, you can still use Confluence analytics to draw some conclusions about the performance of your documentation.
Confluence can show you which pages get the most visits, and you can analyze page engagement over time. If you have a page in your help center with high traffic, and you haven’t seen many tickets coming in related to that topic, you can assume that it’s helpful content.
If you are seeing tickets around a specific subject come in regularly despite high traffic on a related Confluence page, maybe it’s time to revisit that content and see if there is a more straightforward way to present the information—or maybe you’re missing an important point.
Performing an audit of recent tickets can also help you discover opportunities to further develop your documentation. Commonly asked questions that are easy to resolve with self-service should always be added to user documentation.
Build Documentation That Makes a Difference
Ready to start building documentation your team and customers will actually want to use?
Our Confluence guide is a great place to start—you’ll learn all about setting up and organizing a space, then using tools like Gliffy to make your content engaging and impactful.