Ticket deflection
Ticket deflection is the practice of answering a user question through the site itself, so the question never becomes a support ticket.
Feedback tools sit on the far side of deflection from search and chat. Search and chat deflect the question being asked right now. Feedback deflects the next hundred people who would have asked it, by naming the page that produced the confusion in the first place.
The mechanism is unglamorous. A page collects a dozen negative ratings in a month, most of them saying the same thing about an undocumented parameter. You document the parameter. The tickets that page had been generating stop arriving, and no one on the support team notices anything except a quieter queue.
Measuring this honestly is harder than measuring chatbot deflection, because a deflected ticket leaves no record. The usable proxy is per topic: ticket volume for a subject before and after the page that feedback flagged was fixed. Treat that as a directional signal rather than a rate you can put in a board deck.
Frequently asked questions
How does a feedback widget deflect support tickets?
Indirectly. It identifies which pages generate questions, and fixing those pages removes the reason to ask. The deflection shows up as tickets that are never opened, which is why it is felt before it is measured.
Is ticket deflection a good reason to buy a feedback tool?
Partly. The effect is real but slow and hard to attribute. The faster payoff is reproducible bug reports and a ranked list of which pages to fix, with deflection arriving later as a consequence.